


a tender perennial

by astroeulogy



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Canon Divergent, Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Multiple Timelines, Original version is chapter 1, Originally Published Pre-Chapter 394, POV Outsider, Rewrite is chapter 2, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:47:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24228325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astroeulogy/pseuds/astroeulogy
Summary: But the truth—the harshest and simplest truth, the truth Hanahaki taught him first and foremost—is that the world isn’t kind or unkind. It simply is. And to thrive, all anyone can do is grow around it.Rewritten as of chapter 394!
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 192
Kudos: 1173
Collections: So beautiful It makes me want to cry





	1. Crocus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pseudoanalytics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudoanalytics/gifts), [painpackerrisingsun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/painpackerrisingsun/gifts), [boneshrine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boneshrine/gifts), [elleskandal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elleskandal/gifts).



> **The first chapter of this work is the story I wrote BEFORE Chapter 394 was published.** I decided to leave it because it resonated with a lot of people. If you're uncomfortable reading the original version because of the reveal that Komori and Sakusa are actually cousins (even though they absolutely ARE NOT in the original piece I wrote), skip ahead to Chapter 2! 
> 
> The stories are largely the SAME. They follow the same plot structure and the same timelines, but the narrator has changed, the core relationship has changed, and the rewritten version took 6 weeks instead of 30 hours.

_Consider the crocus: six salverform petals, three stamen, and an ensiform leaf. With over ninety known species of crocuses across the world to date, it’s classified as a common flower—some might even consider it plain._

_Plant its corm in late July, when the summer sun is sluggish and the days stretch everlong. In six to eight weeks, it will develop a root system. In four months, as the weather turns, it will fall dormant. Vernalization will take approximately fifteen weeks. The cold tells the crocus,_ Not yet. This world is not yet ready for your beauty _. And so the crocus sleeps, waiting for its day to dawn._

_The first breath of spring comes shy and shuddering, while snow still lingers on the topsoil and winter’s chill continues to cling to the bones of the world. This is when the crocus rises, hardy and true and certain—a signal that the world will now be reborn. After weeks and weeks of harsh cold and bitter grays, it’s the sweet crocus that blooms first, with vibrancy._

— an excerpt from _Hanahaki’s Guide to Gardening_ (1962)

*

Motoya learns earlier than most that he’s got a garden for a ribcage. 

_Love just comes easier for some of us,_ his mother tells him that first crisp winter morning when he wakes with white petals coating his throat and tongue and teeth. They’re soaked with spit, their texture both paper-thin and rubbery. He fishes them out with his fingers and wipes them on the rim of the bathroom sink, counting one, two, ten, thirty. _Give it time,_ says his mother from the doorway, her brow pinched with concern. _Your friends will catch up to you soon_.

It feels like a revelation, and the tightness in his chest is somehow less painful knowing it’s literally _rooted_ in life, in growth, in beauty. _They don’t love you like you love them_ , is a sweeter pill to swallow after that.

Besides, it’s not like he can stop himself from falling in love at first sight. He can’t help the way a wide smile makes his heart ache; he can’t keep his breaths from quickening at the sound of a nice voice; he’s always going to feel a soft gaze like a physical touch. And if he can’t stop it, he might as well embrace it.

And so his garden grows: lateral roots in his blood vessels, taproots in his arteries, and white and yellow and purple buds blossoming in the cavities of his lungs. 

Shortly after his ninth birthday, Motoya sits in the doctor’s office atop a chair with a crinkly paper lining and swings his feet while his mom chats with a nurse on the other side of the door. They talk and talk and talk until finally the doctor returns to tell Motoya that he is—and probably always will be—a crocus-grower. 

_Only the most cheerful people can grow crocuses_ , she says. 

Her smile is wide; her voice is nice; her gaze is soft. Motoya shivers with pride, with happiness, and with love. 

He imagines he can feel them, all those tiny flowers in his chest with their petals opening and their heads turning, seeking the warmth of affection like those planted in the ground might seek the sun. It’s strange and wonderful, to know that something beautiful is capable of growing inside him, just below the surface. It makes the occasional pain, however acute, feel worth it.

That’s the first and most important thing Hanahaki teaches him.

*

Flowers took root in Motoya’s lungs because he fell in love like he breathed: instinctually. And when he fell in love, he never got a say in the matter, not the first time or the second or the tenth. They came in quick succession: a girl who picked up his eraser one day, a boy he caught sheltering a kitten from the rain, a friend who threw their arm around his shoulder and nudged their cheeks together like that’s where they belonged. 

Sometimes he felt so full of love he thought he might burst with it, delicate as a soap bubble on the wind. There were days when all he wanted was to confess, _I love you, look at how much I love you_ , and fill the whole room with flowers, roots and petals and everything in between.

But something always stopped him short.

It was the fact of where they grew, maybe. If the petals snuck out of his wrists or reached out from inside his ears, maybe then it would feel like something meant to be shared. If they grew from his scalp and petals fell every time he turned his head, the world would take one look at him and _know_. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have a choice in sharing his feelings. 

But this garden was tucked behind tissue and muscle and bone. Something about that always felt important. If the flowers wanted to be seen, they’d show themselves—wouldn’t they? 

Sometimes he had nightmares. In them, his classmates pushed him onto the cold classroom floor, cracked him open like a nut and reached inside his muddy chest to rip the flowers out one by one. Some nights they’d dig and dig and dig, but all they’d find was dirt. _Guess you weren’t so special after all,_ they’d sneer as they smeared their grubby palms over his tearstained face. 

Come morning Motoya would curl in on himself, a hand to his chest, and will the dreams away, away, away. 

Flowers are such fragile things. Even as young as he was, Motoya knew that much. It was safer to keep them to himself while he could. And if he had to keep the flowers secret, he might as well keep his love secret too.

*

Kiyoomi Sakusa is, above all else, a creature of habit.

His university dorm isn’t all that different from the one they shared at Itachiyama. His impossibly white, indulgently plush comforter still sits atop his extra-long twin bed; his desk is still mostly covered in a supply of Air Salonpas, the cans arranged in six perfectly-kerned rows; his bookshelves are still filled with astronomy textbooks and game recordings—one to expand his world far past the earthly reach of his anxiety and the other to reduce it back to the comforts of a familiar 60’ x 30’ box. 

Standing in this room feels like dreaming of the past. Even the smell is the same. 

Motoya makes sure to stand a full three feet away from everything while he waits for Sakusa to finish getting ready. It’s still a process, and it probably always will be, but there’s fewer steps to it than Motoya remembers. There’s still wiping down the knobs of his dresser and the handle to his closet before and after he touches them; there’s still the face mask stretched over Sakusa’s mouth and an unseasonably warm jacket spread across his broad shoulders; there’s still a careful balancing act involved when he tentatively steps into his shoes. 

But Sakusa doesn’t wear gloves much, these days. And he has product in his hair. And he’s more than doubled the list of places he’s willing to eat out at. Progress made in baby steps is still progress, and Motoya brims with pride at every reminder that Sakusa’s willing to progress, that despite all the ways he hasn’t changed at all, there’s still some room for evolution.

What’s Motoya supposed to do with that other than hope?

“Ready?” Sakusa asks, jolting Motoya from his thoughts. He maybe—maybe—jumps a little in surprise. Sakusa’s expression stays blank. “Don’t space out so much,” he warns in a flat voice. He doesn’t move for the door.

Motoya shakes his head, collects his wits, and smiles. “I can’t help it,” he complains. “I’m _starving_!” 

He steps past Sakusa, careful not to touch him, and tugs his sleeve over his hand before opening the door.

“What does your stomach have to do with your attention span?” huffs Sakusa. When he moves past Motoya, he allows their shoulders to brush—briefly, through all the layers of clothes between them—but he doesn’t stop or look back. 

A tightness blooms, equal parts painful and lovely, in the pit of Motoya’s chest. His throat itches, a telltale sign, so he lingers a moment to cough petals into the bend of his elbow, purple and yellow and white alike.

They’re beautiful. The sight of them never fails to fill Motoya with pride. Here it is: the physical proof of his love for Kiyoomi Sakusa, plain as day and impossibly pretty. 

Someday, he hopes to be able to share them with him. He’d grow an entire bouquet and pluck it right from his chest for Sakusa, if that’s what it took to be allowed to love him openly, to not have to hide it behind his palm or in the bend of his elbow or in a wadded up tissue. 

But not yet. Sakusa’s come a long way, but there’s still not much room in him for love. Motoya knows this like he knows his own name. He knows, too, that there’s a chance Sakusa may never be built to love. And that would be okay, too. Motoya’s got more than enough for the both of them.

For now, he shakes his petals onto the floor—though they deserve a better resting place than the old two-toned carpet of the dorm building—and he jogs to catch up with Sakusa’s long, imperious strides. 

*

Their story started nearly eight years ago, on a spring day not so unlike this one.

Motoya’s options for high school were limited, to say the least. He’d just never been very smart, and his mom wasn’t exactly well connected. They’d always been alone in the world, the two of them, and money’s never grown on trees. 

It’s not like he _wanted_ the bad grades he’d earned in middle school, but there was always something he’d rather be thinking about than class. Volleyball, mostly, which was the only thing that managed to keep his mind off the merry-go-round of crushes he’d assembled, built on firm soil and hope, that continued to spin aimlessly on and on as the days passed.

Just thinking about high school felt greedy, back then. His mom encouraged him anyway, because she’s great, but when he took his entrance exams they both knew that his only real hope was the _Best Libero_ awards he’d earned back-to-back in his last two years of middle school.

A recruiter showed up on their doorstep before the exam results were released. He wore a crisp black suit with a yellow-and-green pin on the lapel. The lenses of his glasses were as thick as Motoya’s thumbs. 

From the stairway, he eavesdropped while the recruiter and his mom spoke in quiet tones. Money was brought up more than once. Motoya’s grades too. 

Then, quietly, his mother asked, _You really want him? Even with his condition?_

And the man said, _We want him. His condition will eventually pass. We don’t want to see the same happen to his talent_. 

Just like that, it was decided. 

His mom helped him pack his things in late March, both of them trying not to cry as they folded his clothes and separated various trinkets and decorations into “home” and “dorm” piles. Itachiyama’s policies for recipients of their athletic scholarships were stricter than most; living off-campus simply wasn’t an option. 

The cherry blossoms bloomed so early that year. It was hard to focus on peeling posters off his walls when they kept getting distracted by the splashes of pink just beyond the window.

 _The sooner we finish this, the sooner we can admire them outside_ , his mom sighed again and again, trying to convince herself to keep working as much as him. 

It wasn’t until they loaded his things into the car, drove across Tokyo, unloaded all of it into his dorm, and said their tearful goodbyes that Motoya realized they’d never actually stopped to look at the cherry blossoms at all. He could have reached out. Maybe he should have. Instead he stood in the middle of his new room and felt, for the first time in his life, a yawning cavern of loneliness opening in the middle of his chest. An entire field of flowers wouldn’t have been enough to fill it.

“Oh,” a voice said. 

Motoya had missed the sound of the door opening. He shrieked and nearly jumped out of his skin. 

Standing just inside the room was a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy with skin like moonlight. He wore a mask over his face with his shoulders curled in and his brow pinching deeper and deeper with every passing second. 

“Hi,” Motoya said weakly, voice paper-thin, heart thudding about like a rolling stone in his chest. “I’m Komori. Are you my roommate?”

The boy considered this. “You’re the libero,” he said as he stalking deeper into the room. He used the bottom of his shoe to kick the door shut behind him and kept out of arm’s reach even as he came close enough for Komori to feel his gaze, cold as icicles and twice as sharp. “You’re taller than I expected.”

A feeling like pride welled within Motoya. 

“That’s me,” he said, hands on his hips. “What position do you play? Wait—first, what’s your name?”

The boy said, “Sakusa,” in a flat, bored tone. “I’m the ace.”

  
  
*

They make their way to their coffee shop. The cherry blossoms are in bloom, and the streets are lined with trees dripping with delicate pink petals. Every breath Motoya takes is sweeter than the last. Spring is, has always been, and will always be his favorite time of year.

At his side, Sakusa curls his shoulders further in and sinks deeper into a slouch. His expression is thunderous. Errant blossoms catch in his hair, and he twitches and jerks his head about to dislodge them all while dodging other pedestrians, careful not to touch any of them. 

His posture and expression soften once they’re in the shop, taking up their usual space in the furthest booth from the door. Sakusa goes through the usual ritual of wiping down the table while Motoya strips his jacket off, leaves it in his half of the booth, and goes to order their drinks: a matcha latte for Sakusa and a hot mocha for Motoya. 

When he returns to the booth, the tabletop is clean and shiny, and Sakusa looks as comfortable as he ever does in public.

“Where were we?” Motoya asks casually, like he wasn’t hanging off of the handful of words Sakusa said on the way over. When Sakusa flicks a cool, unimpressed look up at him, he offers a wry grin in return. “Right—your recruitment offers. What’d you get?”

“Starting position offers from the Falcons, Warriors, and Jackals,” Sakusa says, eyeing his drink like it might bite him. “Second string offers from the Adlers and you guys.”

Ah. Disappointment curls in Motoya’s gut, and the edges of his smile take on a forced quality. He says, “Yeah, we’ve had a pretty full roster since Suna came on last season. Sorry ‘bout that.”

Sakusa grunts but says nothing. He looks, overall, unbothered. Which is probably to be expected, since he’s got three starting offers from Division 1 teams. The Falcons and Warriors are good teams, but—

“It’s gotta be the Jackals, right?” Motoya says, already picturing Sakusa in black and gold. It’ll suit him almost too well, actually. 

Sakusa cuts a sharp, narrow look up at him. “What makes you say that.”

“Well, they’re the best of the three,” Motoya says, holding up a finger. He lifts another beside it. “That’s where Bokuto went, and you always liked him more than you let on,” here Sakusa hunches his shoulders but doesn’t deny it; Motoya’s smile stretches ever wider. He lifts a third finger, “Also: Atsumu. Don’t give me that look.”

 _That look_ could kill, probably. Sakusa’s expression has gone perfectly, dangerously blank except for a deep furrow of his brow. He looks like he’s been tricked into taking a massive bite out of a lemon, rind and all.

“What look,” he says through grit teeth.

“Look?” Motoya asks innocently, happy to play along. “Did someone say something about a look? You must’ve misheard.”

Atsumu Miya’s been a sore spot from the beginning. Motoya remembers intimately the days after their first winter spent at the Japan All-Youth Training Camp, when Sakusa had returned to Itachiyama and realized slowly but surely that someone _else_ had been to thank for most of the improvement he thought _he’d_ made on his own. It had been the beginning of a years-long rivalry that Motoya only followed the threads of; it involved a lot of dark looks from Sakusa, smug smirks from Atsumu, and hardly any words at all.

Now Sakusa lowers his glare to the tabletop. He drags his drink closer and takes a cautious sip from it. 

“Romero’s still playing for the Adlers,” he says in a low voice, like confessing a secret.

“So’s Ushijima,” Motoya counters. “I can’t imagine the two of you on the same side of the net. It’s too weird.”

The corner of Sakusa’s mouth tips up into the ghost of a smile. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Still.” 

Right. Romero is a pretty big pro for the Adlers here. There were long nights back in high school when Sakusa would practically glue himself to his laptop to follow Romero’s games. He could probably handle being benched, if it meant wearing the same colors as his childhood hero.

“If you start for a team,” Motoya says, “you’re guaranteed to play them. You used to beat Ushijima in head-to-head tests all the time. Think you can still do it?”

“No,” Sakusa says without hesitating. “But I’ll catch up.”

“I think the Black Jackals will get you there fastest,” Motoya says. “They have my vote.” 

Sakusa rolls his eyes but says nothing else. Instead, he stares out the window at the people passing by on the streets and the cherry blossoms catching on the wind around them. He loses himself in thought like that, holding himself rigidly away from the back of the booth’s bench. 

It takes physical effort for Motoya to tear his gaze away. Privately, he thinks this is how he always wants to see Sakusa: calm and cool against a backdrop of spring, haloed by dancing petals.

*

They’ve come a long way from their semester at Itachiyama.

Back then, the other guys were all scared of Sakusa, but none of them wanted to admit it. This much was immediately obvious, right from the start. Even their captain eyed him with some wariness, like he was measuring the pros and cons of putting Sakusa in a muzzle. And when the alternative was listening to Sakusa biting out harsh critiques of their teammates’ technique, Motoya could only be sympathetic to them.

But try as he might, he couldn’t bring himself to feel nervous around Sakusa like the rest of them. Maybe it was familiarity—it’s hard to be scared of anyone you’ve seen in their pajamas, with a toothbrush sticking out of their mouth and clips in their hair—but Motoya always saw something different in Sakusa. 

“How do you _live_ with him?” one of their teammates asked after a particularly brutal practice; Sakusa had been relentless with his spikes, and after a while it was easy to take those nasty spins personally. 

Motoya laughed, cheeks coloring. Having the attention of older kids always flustered him a little despite himself. “He’s not so bad,” he argued anyway. “He’s being helpful, in his own way.”

The upperclassmen looked far from convinced. They exchanged skeptical looks with one another in between gulps of water and panted breaths. Some of them put their hands on their hips and doubled over, wheezing. All of them were red-faced and grumpy.

Motoya had the vague hope, however futile, that they’d see things differently tomorrow, when the sharp pains of a fresh practice had faded to the dull aches of muscle regrowth.

“Whatever,” one of them sighed. “As long as he keeps scoring points, a win for him is a win for all of us.”

Their captain cuffed him upside the head for that, and Motoya jumped, startled. 

“That sort of lazy thinking doesn’t win championships,” their captain said, mouth pinched in a sneer. “If you’ve got a problem with a player, bring it up to me or Coach. Did you hear either of us telling Sakusa to shut his mouth?”

Silence. Motoya could do nothing but watch with wide eyes as the other upperclassmen hung their heads with shame and averted their gazes elsewhere. 

“That’s what I thought,” said their captain, moving on.

Along the far wall, Sakusa stretched his arm under the watchful eye of their assistant coach, their heads bent together in quiet conversation.

Motoya’s knees ached, scraped up from a particularly risky flying receive he’d made, but something inside him hurt more. He had a sense, however vague, that if he’d been a little fiercer, a little harsher with his upperclassmen, maybe they’d have backed off Sakusa sooner. 

Because while everyone else saw Sakusa like a beast—something vicious, only as useful to them as he was devastating to their enemies—Motoya had laid awake in his bunk on more than one occasion, close enough to Sakusa to hear his trembling, wet breaths and the quiet whimpers of someone very much _afraid_. 

More than anything else, he found himself wanting to protect him. It was the same nameless thing that drove him to dive for balls no one thought could be dug, that had led him to back-to-back _Best Libero_ awards. If he believed he could reach something, all he had to do was leap. And he believed, even back then, that he could reach Sakusa.

He was sure of one thing, though: whatever desire Motoya had to defend him, Sakusa wouldn’t thank him for it if he caught on. It was a feeling that was best relegated to the same place Motoya’s long list of would-be loves lived: among the crocuses. 

  
  


*

  
  


The V. League requires all Division 1 teams to keep a Hanahaki expert on retainer. It’s not a traditionally lethal condition, especially for professional athletes in their physical prime, but it’s prudent to be cautious with anything that might impact a player’s breathing. In most studies, Hanahaki is rated as a common condition, but those numbers drop steeply in population samples taken from careers that demand an inordinate amount of time from people. 

Basically: it’s hard to be in love when you’re pouring your heart and soul out for a paycheck. It’s even harder when you’re a minor celebrity who can take their pick of any dozens of fans to bestow your affections on.

Motoya doesn’t think much about it—he’s had his condition for so long it’s barely a footnote to his days—but when he arrives for his bi-monthly checkup with Dr. Imai, he comes up short in the doorway, surprised.

“Washio,” he says.

Sure enough, his teammate is sat on Imai’s makeshift med bench, shoulders back and mouth open as the doctor pokes and prods along his gums. He glances over Imai’s shoulder to meet Motoya’s gaze and offers a smile as best he can with someone else’s fingers two knuckles deep against his tongue. 

“Good morning Komori,” Dr. Imai says without a glance back. “Take a seat, we’re just wrapping up.” 

Motoya sits gingerly in a low-backed chair along the closest wall in the office. Imai is their general physician and their Hanahaki expert—killing two birds with one stone means more money kept in EJP’s pockets—so it’s technically _possible_ that Washio’s got other medical business here. But Sunday mornings are typically booked solely for Hanahaki visits. For Motoya’s visits, specifically. 

Imai withdraws his fingers from Washio’s mouth, and from where he’s sitting Motoya sees a splash of red. _Blood_ , he thinks. But no: petals. He can’t make out the shape, but Washio plucks another from his lip and when he catches Motoya staring he casts his gaze away quickly, radiating uncomfortableness. 

“Sorry!” Motoya says quickly, ashamed of himself. He knows all too well how it feels to be scrutinized after an episode. “I didn’t mean to stare. I’m just—surprised. Usually I’m the only one.”

“It’s,” Washio starts. Stops. Swallows. Something serious sets in the lines of his expression. “It’s recent.”

Motoya can’t help but wonder if he swallowed down a mouthful of petals with his pride just to say that much.

“Ah,” he says. “Well, let me know if I can help at all! I’m kind of an expert. I bet I could give Imai a run for his money.”

Imai snorts a laugh from where he’s bent over a chart, no doubt diligently filling out little blank squares in his chicken scratch shorthand. “You should respect your elders more,” he says, brimming with fondness.

Motoya’s grin is wide and pleased. “But I _do_ respect you, Doc!” he insists. “Where would I be without your diligent care?” 

“You’d be fertilizer by now, probably,” Imai admits, glancing up briefly from his clipboard to give Motoya a soft look. 

“Exactly,” Motoya agrees, nodding sagely. He casts his smile Washio’s way with a wink, offering him an in to the joke if he wants it.

Washio still looks vaguely uncomfortable, but he offers a shaky smile in return. “Ha,” he says.

It’s just so _silly_. Motoya can’t help but laugh, bright and delighted, the sound filling the small office as he doubles over a little in his seat. 

He’s been tending a flowerbed for so long he forgets, sometimes, that other people don’t know what it’s like to sink their fingers into the soil. Not everyone feels a shiver in their lungs and thinks, _Ah, this is beautiful_ , like he does. To them, it might as well be a death sentence; to him, it’s proof of life: _I love, therefore I am._

“You’ll get used to it,” he says when he’s calmed down a little, smile still twitching at the corner of his mouth.

Washio squints at him.

“I doubt that,” he says, with feeling.

Motoya’s pocket buzzes. He fishes his phone out and blinks at the screen, surprised even as all the warmth of a summer day fills him to brimming.

 **[Sakusa Kiyoomi] [08:21:13]:** _I’m going to sign with the Jackals._

He starts to type out a response, but a second text comes in before he finishes:

 **[Sakusa Kiyoomi] [08:21:45]:** _Thanks._

Motoya stares at it for several minutes. When he regains control of his thumbs, he sends:

 **[Me] [08:22:08]:** _try not to kill Atsumu_

 **[Me] [08:22:17]:** _you’re welcome :)_

*

Atsumu Miya came into their lives at the turn of the seasons, as autumn slid into winter.

It happened shortly after Motoya and Sakusa accepted invitations to the All-Youth Training Camp—much to the irritation of their upperclassmen—after they had packed their things and took a taxi across town. 

Motoya remembers it like it was yesterday. He remembers everything about that day.

Sakusa held himself rigidly in the back of their cab, stubbornly refusing to lean against the seat and tensing his legs to keep his feet off the floor mats the whole trip. Every line of him had looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t break a sweat once the entire ten-minute trip. 

“Man,” Motoya sighed near the halfway point. “I envy your core strength.”

Sakusa looked at him, surprised. He glanced down at his legs, then back up. “This isn’t my core,” he said bluntly. “It’s my quads.”

“It’s also your core,” Motoya argued, pointing at Sakusa’s stomach like that alone could prove his point. “You’re leaning forward slightly, see? That’s got your core engaged.” 

Sakusa considered this. He looked surprised, almost, like Motoya being right was something he never expected and thus was woefully unprepared for.

“Come on!” Motoya laughed. “I’m an athlete! You think I don’t know the difference between quad and core exercises? Give me _some_ credit.”

For a moment, they were quiet, Sakusa sizing Motoya up and Motoya sitting patiently to see what he’d find. In the end, Sakusa looked away, something yielding in the muscles near his jaw.

“Whatever,” he bit out, gaze fixed on the cold, dreary world passing by beyond the window.

Motoya hadn’t expected to win. He’d _never_ won before, not in all the months he’d lived with Sakusa. It was so surreal he could do little more than breathe, inhale after exhale after inhale, and try to commit everything about this moment to memory. 

In between one breath and the next was when he felt it: the stirring in his chest. It was a feeling he’d grown intimately familiar with over the last several years.

Outside, winter crept ever closer. But within Motoya, spring had come again. 

He’d felt dizzy with it, with the realization of love blooming anew within him. Just two days ago, he’d been in love with half a dozen people. But all of those feelings shrunk under the weight of this new sensation. As they lugged their things from the taxi, as they were lead to their shared room, as they took turns changing into their practice clothes, and as they headed to the gym for the camp’s kickoff, all Motoya could think about was the shy, embarrassed way Sakusa had turned away from him, the dark of his loose curls framing his serious face, the length of his lashes as he watched the world pass by outside them.

How had Motoya gone so long without realizing how _pretty_ Sakusa was?

He’d been so lost in thought—in the awareness of these new _feelings_ —that Motoya hadn’t been able to dodge out of the way when a boy barrelled past and shouldered him into Sakusa’s side.

His first thought was: _What_.

His second thought was: _Sakusa caught me_.

His third thought was: _Sakusa is still holding me_.

“Ah, shit!” a voice, thick with Kansai-ben, called out from ahead of them. “Sorry ‘bout that!”

Komori blinked. Jogging away from them, with no signs of slowing down, was a boy with bleached blonde hair dressed in red and black and sporting a pair of volleyball sneakers. He hadn’t stopped to apologize to them; he’d only bothered to shout it back over his shoulder.

“What’s he rushing for?” Motoya wondered, peeling himself out of Sakusa’s stiff hold. “Sorry about that,” he said, guilt twisting inside him. If Sakusa heard him, he didn’t acknowledge the apology, too busy glaring down the hallway in the boy’s wake, his arms still outstretched like he might hold dirty laundry or a wet pet he badly didn’t want near him.

Later, amongst all the gossip of the camp—

 _That’s Sakusa Kiyoomi—they say his setters_ hate _him!; Itachiyama has_ two _invitees this year?; Did that shortie call himself a hitter? No way!_

 _—_ they learned that the boy’s name was Atsumu Miya. He was the first invitee from a Hyogo school since the training camp’s inception. 

_They say his sets are the best in the nation_ already.

Back then, Motoya didn’t know enough about setting to be impressed by the claim. He and Sakusa had already had enough of cocky setters to last them a lifetime. During introductions, Motoya kept an eye on Sakusa’s pinched, irritated expression and sent up a quiet prayer that they’d make it through the entire week without incident. 

And even though Sakusa glared at the back of Atsumu Miya’s head the whole time, through one perfect set after another, they actually did. And by the end of the week, most of the gossip about Sakusa’s attitude passed in favor of quiet complaints about the nastiness of his spikes. 

_As it should be_ , Motoya thought, bursting with pride and happiness and a love brand new.

*

On a sunny day in mid-June, Sakusa extends an awkward invitation to Motoya to come along and check out his new apartment with him. It comes as part of his contract with the Jackals, which is fresh enough that the ink is probably still wet. Though Sakusa’s agent no doubt went over the space with a fine-toothed comb, time hasn’t changed Sakusa’s aversion to unfamiliar places; the fact that he wants Motoya to be there as a sort of crutch through the inevitable move at all feels important.

Motoya can’t say yes fast enough. Or with enough exclamation marks. In the middle of the sidewalk, he all but erupts with happiness, spilling petals from his mouth and onto his lips and all down the front of his shirt. A few kids point and laugh at him; an elderly woman scowls in his direction; a couple bow their heads together and whisper with one another while deliberately turning their heads away. 

Motoya is impervious to all of it. He’s going to help Sakusa, at _Sakusa’s_ request.

Reality dawns too soon.

Sakusa signing with the Black Jackals means he’ll be going to Osaka. That’s not exactly close to Hiroshima, which means their visits with one another will no doubt be limited. Who knows how often they’ll get to darken their booth at their coffee shop? Who knows how many times a month or a year they’ll be able to meet up at all? What if they only see each other through the net, after this?

The thought makes Motoya’s stomach hurt. He’s always been short sighted—it’s his fatal flaw. At least he’d dissuaded Sakusa from joining the Adlers; Sendai might as well be an entire world away.

That weekend, they make the trip down to Hirakata City in a rental with Sakusa glowering at any driver who so much as looks his way. He keeps the steering wheel in a white-knuckled grip the whole four-plus hours there, even when Motoya hooks up his phone to the sound system and starts singing along to a collection of their favorite pop songs that no one else would ever believe Sakusa really, actually likes. 

And if Motoya steals glances across the console at Sakusa’s profile the whole way there—well. That’s for him to know. Another secret to bury in the garden, to nurture and coax into a gentle bloom away from prying eyes.

The apartment complex is nicer than the ones EJP offers in their contracts, but that reflects the difference of their team’s sponsors more than anything else. The Black Jackals have surprisingly deep pockets. 

They linger outside of Sakusa’s apartment while the realtor collects the key. Unit 1140, all the way at the end of the hall. Sakusa looks pleased with this, at least. 

“Did your agent mention sponsorships yet?” he asks.

Sakusa shifts his weight from foot to foot and casts a look down the hallway, no doubt judging the cleanliness of the floors. “Not sponsorships,” he says.

It’s the cagiest Motoya’s heard him in a while. Strange. He could press further, but he’s learned that Sakusa sometimes needs time to open up a little. Give him room to breathe, a stable place to stand, and a little sunshine and in time it’ll happen.

“Air Salonpas would be on the phone in a heartbeat if they saw your room,” he teases, and Sakusa rolls his eyes.

Voices come from down the hall. Two girls turn off from the elevator corridor, so immersed in conversation between one another that they don’t notice there’s anyone else in the hall until they’re at the door next to Sakusa’s. 

“Oh!” one of them exclaims, startled. Her eyes go wide, then soften with realization. “Are you going to be our neighbor?”

Motoya shakes his head quickly. “Not me,” he says, and try as he might he can’t make it sound like it’s _not_ an apology. He gestures over his shoulder. “This guy.”

The girls look at Sakusa, and maybe it’s a trick of the light but they seem to pale a little. 

“Ah—welcome,” the other girl says while the first gets the door unlocked. “Hope you like the place. We’ll see you around?”

They wait just long enough for Sakusa to give a sharp, stiff nod, then they push into their apartment and close the door with a little more strength than is probably strictly necessary. 

“Oof,” Motoya says, a giggle bubbling up from inside. “You’ve always had a way with the ladies, Sakusa. What do you think? Did you make a good first impression?” 

“Shut up.”

The realtor appears before Motoya can dissolve into peals of laughter, and together they enter Sakusa’s new home.

*

A way with the ladies, indeed. That's the kindest possible way to put it.

In between games at their first trip to the spring tourney, Motoya and Sakusa’s path back to the hotel was once abruptly cut off by a group of girls passing through to the shopping booths. They were talking and giggling amongst one another, waving colorful signs decorated with glitter and feathers and letter cutouts.

“Oh, whoa,” Motoya said, pointing at one. “Does that say Miya? Like Atsumu Miya?”

Sakusa’s expression—which was already as thunderous as Motoya’d ever seen it—darkened. He glared at the sign like he could will it to combust. 

On closer inspection, it looked like _all_ of the girls were holding signs reading _Miya_. 

“I had no idea he was this popular,” Motoya said

The picture of Atsumu was still fresh in his mind from training camp a couple weeks ago: a cocksure boy with a thick accent and an appetite for victory. He won more matches than he lost, but everyone seemed to shrink away from him the second they were off the court. Motoya’s own interactions with him had been few and far between, but that first impression had been enough for him to generally get the gist: Atsumu Miya was a brat, plain and simple. A great volleyball player, sure, but a brat nonetheless.

Could brats have fans like this? Probably. Itachiyama had a huge, loyal fanbase of their own, but no individuals seemed to gain more of the crowd’s affection than others.

That would probably change after this tournament, though, Motoya knew. Sakusa hadn’t been able to play much during the summer, but he’d started every game so far this season, putting him and his wrists front and center in front of thousands of people. If they made it to the finals, he’d no doubt be seen in households across the entire nation. 

“The Miyas get better every time we see them!” one girl said, voice a dreamy sigh. “Do you think we’ll get a chance to get their autographs?”

“Osamu signed some after the last game, I think,” said another. “Atsumu never does though.”

“Aw. I really want a joint autograph from both of them. They’re my favorite duo!”

“The Miya twins are _everyone’s_ favorite duo.”

At Motoya’s side, Sakusa stiffened.

“What?” Motoya asked him, but he was already stalking ahead. 

“Twins?” Sakusa demanded of one of the girls, furious as a summer storm, and the girls half-stepped back, the color draining from their faces. “Did. You say. Miya. _Twins_?”

 _Oh._ Motoya tried to picture it: two Atsumu Miyas. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant picture for him, sure, but Sakusa looked about two seconds away from snatching one of those posters in the girls’ hands and tearing it in two. 

“Sorry!” Motoya hurried to say, putting himself between the girls and Sakusa, careful not to touch any part of Sakusa’s tense, angry body as he went. “Don’t mind him—he’s—” well, he was like this a lot, actually, but they didn’t have to know that, “—having a bad day. Sorry again. Excuse us.”

He turned and gave a serious, disapproving look at Sakusa, who at least had the decency to look vaguely contrite as he slunk away, back towards the main gym they’d just come from.

“I thought we were going back to the hotel!” Motoya called after him.

But Sakusa kept going, and he didn’t look back.

*

They have a practice the morning before their first scheduled game of the season. It’s against the Falcons, which guarantees a good challenge, but Motoya can’t stop looking at his phone. They’ll be riding down to Osaka this afternoon, and he texted Sakusa a few hours ago to confirm their dinner plans. His phone’s been quiet ever since, and it burns a hole in his pocket as he finishes packing his duffle.

Someone says, “What’ll we do once we get to Osaka, boys?” and whoops rise up around Motoya, filling the room all at once.

“Count Komori out,” someone else teases. “He’s probably got a _date_.”

“Is that jealousy I hear?” Motoya asks, laughing as he does. “Can’t a guy meet up with his best friend?”

“Sure he can,” his captain says, all boyish smiles and summer tan. “But is that all you and Sakusa are? We all saw those pictures.”

The pictures had been taken when Motoya and Sakusa had gotten caught in a sudden storm after moving all of Sakusa’s stuff into his apartment. They’d been taken by fans, on cellphone cameras, and the angles were a lot more damning than anything Motoya and Sakusa had actually been doing. That didn’t mean Motoya’s heart didn’t race when he first saw them—and every time since—but the fact of the matter is that _nothing_ happened.

“Ugh,” he says, rolling his eyes even as he feels color flood his cheeks. “I already _told you_. Sakusa’s my friend. That’s all.”

And, more importantly, Motoya’s Sakusa’s friend. Possibly his only friend in the world, even after four years of university. Even after all the steps of progress Sakusa’s made since they met their first year of high school. Through it all, only Motoya has been a constant— _the_ constant. The only person allowed inside. Even if it’s only a step or two past where everyone else is allowed to go, Motoya hoards those steps like treasure, like jewels and gold bars and coins alike.

He turns away. Someone’s eyes linger on him, their gaze a weight against the back of his neck, and he reaches up to close his palm over the tender, vulnerable, exposed stretch of skin. It’s warm to the touch, so it must be red. Knowing that only makes him blush harder.

“Whose idea was it for him to join the Black Jackals?” someone asks on a groan. “Like they weren’t already enough of a pain, before.”

An ugly, selfish compulsion urges him to say, _Look how he listens to me. Look how he values my opinion. Imagine what I must mean to him_. That’s why he says, “Mine, actually.”

The room goes quiet. Then someone complains, “You mean you _want_ to receive those spikes of his? What sort of masochist are you?” and laughter swells, echoing off the tall walls and high ceiling.

Motoya joins in as he zips his bag shut and shoulders it. Maybe he is a masochist, because he is kind of looking forward to receiving Sakusa’s spikes again. It’s been years, but he didn’t go to all of those university games Sakusa played in for nothing—he’s seen the spins on those balls; he thinks he’s up to the challenge.

His throat starts to itch. He draws a slow breath through his nose. The itch persists. Sometimes he can bury his feelings but usually—when it comes to Sakusa—they overrun him and all he can do is give in. 

So he ducks his head and coughs into the bend of his elbow. He’s still coughing a full minute later, when he pushes through the locker room door, wanders down a hall, and braces himself against a wall to cough to his heart’s content.

When he’s finished, he’s standing in a sea of petals—white and purple and yellow—and Suna is standing at his side, duffle at his feet and a water bottle offered coolly in Motoya’s direction—Motoya recognizes it as his own.

“Thanks,” he says, accepting it with a bashful smile. “I’ll clean it up in a—”

Suna waves a hand dismissively. This close, he looks even cooler and more unflappable than ever. Motoya envies him for it, a little. 

“So you told Sakusa to sign with the Jackals,” Suna says, eyes fixed on the opposite wall. 

Motoya finishes gulping down half his water bottle, wipes the back of his wrist against his mouth, and says, “Yeah. Are you mad?”

Suna jerks his chin. _No._ “Just curious. I thought you wouldn’t want him with Atsumu, is all.”

Right—Motoya forgets sometimes that Suna and Atsumu were teammates. Suna doesn’t have the accent he associates with Inarizaki, for one, and for two it’s kind of hard to imagine Suna and Atsumu in the same sentence, let alone in the same room. 

“Sakusa complains,” Motoya agrees, “but Atsumu’s always been the setter he plays best with. I don’t necessarily get their—thing—” all those challenging looks, the growled words, the uncomfortable tension between them might as well be another language to him, frankly, “—but I think it’s good for him. He likes winning more than anything else, and he’s gonna win more with Atsumu setting for him.”

He says it without thinking, but as soon as it’s out in the open, he feels like he’s shoved his fist into his chest, ripped apart the skin and bone, and offered Rintarou Suna a look at exactly what he’s made of: flowers and secrets and love, all for Kiyoomi Sakusa. It hurts. He wants to take it back, but he curls in on himself instead, trying to close off physically like that will keep Suna’s searing gaze at bay.

But all Suna says is, “Their thing,” in a thoughtful tone. For a beat, he’s quiet, still inspecting the wall before him like he’s unaware of the enormity of what Motoya’s just admitted to him—or like he simply doesn’t care. “As long as you’re okay with it, I guess,” he sighs eventually. “Want to grab some grub before we have to catch the bus?” he asks.

And Motoya, still hunched in on himself with his breaths coming unevenly, can only nod.

*

He’d been on the end of Suna’s cool assessment before.

In their third year, at spring nationals, Atsumu Miya led Inarizaki to a victory for the first time ever. They’d finally defeated Itachiyama at center court, and before Motoya and Sakusa could grieve the loss, they were separated by recruiters descending on them like starved vultures.

It took the better part of an hour for Motoya to escape their talons, and he stumbled out into the all-but-empty hallway off of the main gymnasium in a daze. He’d wanted, in order: to talk to Sakusa, to thank the captain, and to eat himself into a food coma.

He’d found Suna instead, who came out of the room nextdoor, looking conflicted. 

“Recruiters?” Motoya asked with a knowing smile.

“Just Division 3,” Suna said flatly. “You?”

“Division 2.” A lie, but a white one, because he didn’t want to come off as bragging.

Suna looked like he saw right through it, but he said nothing. “Whatever. Where—”

“Oy!” shouted a voice, and for a second Motoya thought it was Atsumu. Instead, it was his twin, dressed down with his hands on his hips. He had a lipstick stain on his cheek and the look of someone who was about to set the building on fire. It was the most emotion Motoya had ever seen the other Miya have, and they’d just played five entire sets against one another for the third time in their high school careers. “Where have you _been_ ?” he demanded of Suna. “The others went to dinner _an hour ago_.”

“And you waited for me?” asked Suna, a strange tone in his voice that Motoya’d never heard before. Fondness? “Osamu, I’m blushing.”

He wasn’t blushing, but when he said it, Osamu started to. 

Motoya was overcome with the sudden feeling that he was intruding on something. He turned to go as Suna spoke again.

“Where’s your idiot brother?” 

“Saw him‘n Sakusa at center court on my way over.”

A look passed between them. Suna said, “I think we can get out if we go that way,” he said pointing in the opposite direction. Osamu nodded.

Motoya moved towards the gym. If Sakusa was still there, he was probably waiting for him—it’d be impolite to keep him waiting. Also, being so close to two people so obviously into one another was kind of making him feel jealous, which was decidedly unpleasant. 

“Hey, where’re ya goin’?” Miya asked, and Motoya froze.

“I left my stuff back in the gym,” he lied before he could think better of it. 

A look passed between the two again, but eventually Osamu said, “Yeah, alright. Good game tonight. If you see my brother back there, tell him we left.”

Motoya nodded. Then he fled. 

He found Sakusa alone at center court, facing the main entrance. At the sight of him, Motoya’s steps slowed to a stop without him consciously willing them to, and it’s all he could do to study the familiar slumped line of Sakusa’s shoulders and the defiant tilt of his head.

The room was filled only with the distant whirring of machinery—the air being cycled, the floors being polished, the entire event being packed away until next time when it would be opened by a generation of players they no longer belonged to.

Motoya stood with his feet planted, roots clinging to the soil they always called home. Only twenty feet separated him from Sakusa. Inexplicably, it felt like an ocean, brimming with waves that threatened to carry Sakusa away to distant, wondrous shores while Motoya could do nothing more than watch.

But that wasn’t true. He could say, “Sakusa?”

Sakusa turned to look at him. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and pale as a sheet. Exhaustion wore him like a threadbare tshirt. The old urge to protect him stirred within Motoya.

He said, “Let’s go home.”

*

They play the Black Jackals, complete with Sakusa Kiyoomi in the lineup, on the cusp of autumn. He looks as good in his uniform as Motoya knew he would, and it’s difficult not to steal glances at him during stretches and warm-up. When they line up to shake hands, Motoya’s standing across the net from the Black Jackals’ libero, a man called Shion who’s several centimeters shorter than Motoya but exudes the dominance you’d expect from someone twice as tall.

He’s not sure who gets to shake Sakusa’s hand, but he envies them for every second of it. 

They take their places. The Jackals won the coin toss and chose to receive first. Motoya makes his way off the court as Washio takes his place in the serving position. Across the net, Sakusa stands in the back right corner beside a monster of a man called Barnes and behind his team captain. He looks so _right_ there that Motoya’s chest stirs with something like pride.

 _I did this_ , he wants to gloat, even though he knows it’s not his place. _I pushed you towards them_. 

The whistle blows. 

Washio serves. Barnes receives and sends it back to Atsumu, who licks his lips and bounces into the air, calling—

“Omi-kun!”

Something hard and heavy coalesces in Motoya’s stomach. By the time Sakusa’s whipped his palm across the back of the ball and sunk it right into the heart of their court, the feeling has started to sink deep in Motoya’s gut.

He takes the court with it ringing in his ears like a siren, like a warning. _Omi-kun, Omi-kun, Omi-kun_. 

*

The sirens sounded that day, too.

It was a stormy evening in March. Graduation, which had been creeping ever-closer for weeks now, suddenly stormed the gate and stood on the other side of the door, waiting to be let in. Motoya felt numb to it all, though, because Sakusa had just told him—

“You’re _not_ going pro?” he asked, incredulous.

Sakusa glanced over his shoulder. His hair was pinned away from his face. A toothbrush hung out of his mouth. The bags beneath his eyes were especially pronounced. Motoya loved him as sweetly as he’d loved him that day in the taxi over two years ago. The sweetness twisted into pain.

It was strange—usually it happened the other way around.

“Why?” he asked, voice weaker than he wanted it to be. They were going to sign to Raijin together. They were—they were gonna move their stuff to Hiroshima together, into different apartments side by side. They had _plans_. The sudden change felt like a swift and decisive sort of betrayal.

Sakusa spat delicately into the sink and turned on the faucet.

“People with hypermobile joints are more prone to injury,” he said. “I need a fallback plan so I’ll be okay if I end up permanently benched.”

“But—can’t you go to college _then_?” Motoya wanted to cry. His eyes stung with it.

Sakusa sighed. He took a swig of water from his water bottle, gargled it, and spat again. “No,” he said. 

The room spun. Motoya sat down hard, trying to breathe past the pressure in his chest. It wasn’t the flowers. It was something altogether new and so much worse. There was nothing sweet or soft or lovely about _this_.

Sirens rang in his head.

A warning.

“Hey,” Sakusa said gruffly, suddenly close enough to nudge his shoe against Motoya’s in a halfhearted little kick. “I’m still going to Hiroshima. Nothing else has to change.”

Motoya closed his eyes. A tear slipped out despite his best efforts.

“Lead with that next time,” he wheezed, the tightness in his chest finally starting to unwind. “ _Jeez_. Give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”

Sakusa rolled his eyes. “Brush your teeth. I’m going back to the room.”

*

It haunts him.

The easy familiarity that the Jackals showed Sakusa was one thing, but the way Sakusa _accepted it_ and even _answered to it_ was something altogether different. He hadn’t even glared at Atsumu for the nickname; he’d glared at him for a couple dozen other things throughout the night, but by then those had been cold comforts to Motoya’s anxious heart.

How many nights had he spent with the name _Kiyoomi_ heavy on his tongue? How many times had he typed it into Sakusa’s contact in his phone only to erase it and replace it with just _Sakusa_ . Using his given name in any capacity had always seemed too _obvious_. It made him feel greedy, like he was expecting something more when really all he could claim to want was the right to hope.

Is even that too much?

The embarrassment of losing to the Jackals pales in comparison to the sudden, all-consuming furze of fear that’s sprouted within him: the fear of being outgrown.

He knows, from years of hard-earned familiarity, that Sakusa is as tricky to keep as a fistful of sand; tightening his grip is a surefire way to lose him. But neediness rips him open and scoops something vital from within, forcing itself in among the delicate rows of crocuses, trampling over a lifetime’s worth of secrets.

“Are you free sometime this week?” he asks one, two, five, seven weeks in a row. And Sakusa, who does little outside of volleyball, always sighs and says, _What do you want to do?_

So Motoya makes the four-hour trip into Hirakata City and together they visit museums and restaurants that Sakusa’s interested in and, once, end up sitting elbow to elbow in a planetarium, with a map of the known universe expanding before their eyes. Sakusa doesn’t even complain when Motoya nods off; he doesn’t even try to wake him until the lights come up again, leaving Motoya flushed and shy and feeling as obvious as a bouquet of red roses: _Love me._

Maybe it’s awful, but the more Sakusa indulges him, the less desperate Motoya is. After a while, he no longer feels like he’s begging for table scraps. Some part of him hates that this is what he’s been reduced to. Before this, love always felt like a beautiful thing, as vibrant and warm as a spring day. This selfish, greedy, ugly thing is like none of that, but when he searches for what to call it he still only thinks, _Love_.

Sakusa calls him a week into December, just as the first chill begins to creep into the earth, and asks, “Are you planning on coming down this week?”

And for the first time in months, Motoya feels confident enough with where he stands in Sakusa’s life to joke, “Nah. I’ve got some stuff to take care of. Think you can have fun without me?”

Sakusa’s quiet for the length of a heartbeat or two or three. Then he says, “I think I can manage.”

*

The last time Motoya asked if Sakusa could have fun without him had resulted in the strangest night of both their lives. 

It was the night of Sakusa’s three-hour final for his freshman Astronomy class, when the Jackals came up to EJP Raijin’s home turf in Hiroshima for a match. High off a surprising win, Motoya—brimming with restlessness—had gone back to his apartment, crawled into bed, and did his level best not to think about his phone. Sakusa’s exam had been scheduled to end two hours ago, but thus far no texts had come through.

Time passed so slowly that night. All he wanted was to call Sakusa and brag, _We beat the fourth best team in the League!_ But something had stayed his hand. And whenever possible, Motoya tried to follow his instincts; they hadn’t led him wrong yet.

The call came in just after midnight. Motoya was on the edge of sleep, so close to plummeting over that at first he thought the vibration was just the siren song of slumber pulling him ever deeper. As soon as he realized what it actually was, he jolted upright and answered the call breathlessly.

“Sakusa?” he asked.

“ _Whaaat_?” Sakusa giggled. “You sound. Weird. Different.”

“Well, I _am_ half asleep.” Motoya blinked blearily into the darkness of his bedroom. He could vaguely make out the shapes of his furniture if he opened his eyes wide enough. “Are you… okay?” he asked. Sleep was still clinging to him. He shook it physically and ignored the pins and needles feeling in his right arm which he must have been laying on strangely.

“... Nooo,” said Sakusa, dragging the word out. Another giggle. “You didn’t come. I thought you’d come.”

Motoya’s heart could have burst with happiness. He felt a stirring in his chest that was a promise of petals inbound if he’d ever felt one before. “Hold on,” he said, and he tucked his face into his elbow and coughed and coughed, careful to angle the phone away from the sound.

Distantly, through the tinny line of their connection, he heard Sakusa say, “You’re… sick?”

“No!” Motoya hurried to say. “No. No, this is just. You know. My condition.”

A crash, a clang, a colorful curse. Sakusa didn’t say anything for a long time. When he finally spoke it again it was on a groan. “I fell.” 

“You fell?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Your kitchen?”

“Kuroo’s kitchen.”

What? “What are you doing in Kuroo’s kitchen?” 

“Party,” Sakusa said simply. “I thought you’d come. That’s why I came.”

He thought he’d come? Motoya hadn’t even known there was going to be a party tonight. He knew Kuroo in passing, and they got along pretty well, but he didn’t realize the guy was even in Hiroshima these days. 

“I didn’t know there was a party,” he said like an apology. “Are you still on the floor?”

“The lights are bright,” said Sakusa. 

Motoya couldn’t help the smile that stretched across his face. “Have you been drinking?” 

“I miss you,” Sakusa said.

Silence prevailed. Motoya, alone in his dark bedroom, closed his eyes against the feelings welling up within him. _I love you,_ he wanted to say so, so badly. He could taste the words on his tongue; he knew exactly how good it would finally feel to say it after years of holding it in like a mouthful of thorns

Sakusa said, “You’re—my. Mine. The only one.”

 _He means a friend,_ Motoya urged himself to believe, trying to cling to logic even as hope sprung eternal within him, enough to nourish all the flowers in his chest for years and years to come.

“You’re mine too,” he whispered into the line. Surely he was allowed this much, right? “The only one. For years now.”

A giggle. It was as wonderful and surreal and delicate as the cherry blossoms that were set to come into bloom any day now. Motoya wanted to bottle that sound up so he could listen to it whenever, forever. It was precious to him like nothing else had been in his entire life; not the flowers in his chest, not the secrets that he kept, not the love he’d felt for all the other people who had come before Sakusa.

Then: a familiar voice—not Sakusa’s—far away and asking, _Who are you talking to?_ then, after some shuffling sounds, right into the phone, “Who’s this?”

“Komori,” Motoya said.

“Oh, thank fuck,” said Kuroo. “You live out here too, right? Can you come get this overgrown idiot out of my kitchen? I have a Biology final tomorrow and need to go the fuck to sleep.”

Motoya laughed. “I think I can make some time. For you,” he teased. “What’s the address?”

By the time he got to Kuroo’s place—which was, as expected, absolutely wrecked in the wake of the party—Sakusa was propped up on a tartan couch, wrapped up in an unfamiliar blanket, chin tucked to his chest. He was snoring. 

Come morning, he remembered nothing at all.

“Your number was on my call log,” he groaned down the line at Motoya, presumably while he cursed the cold, cruel light of morning from the confines of his dorm. “I thought you’d know more.”

“Sorry,” Motoya said, like his morning hadn’t been spent luxuriating in the memory of Sakusa’s saying, _Mine. The only one._ Like his room didn’t look like someone had taken a leaf blower into a flower shop. “I just picked you up and brought you home. I’d ask Kuroo if you want to know more.”

“ _No_ ,” Sakusa said, with finality.

*

They make plans to meet on February 13. 

They’ve got a match the following day, Raijin vs. Jackals in Hiroshima. It’s been so long since Sakusa’s been _home_ that Motoya feels a little dizzy with everything he wants to do. But if they’ve only got an evening, the choice is obvious: he wants to get coffee with him again, at their coffee shop, in their booth.

He texts to confirm their meeting just after noon, already buzzing with a restless, overeager energy he has no outlet for. There are freshly coughed petals in the bathroom sink—the third round since this morning—and he’s already starting to feel that telltale tickle in the back of his throat again.

His phone buzzes.

 **[Sakusa Kiyoomi] [12:16:11]:** _Something came up with a teammate. I can’t make it tonight._

Motoya stares at the text for a long time. It’s strange, being canceled on. It’s never happened in all the years he’s known Sakusa. It occurs to him how good his luck must have been up to this point, for Sakusa to never beg off their meet-ups with claims of sickness or muscle aches. Last minute cancellations happen to everyone. of course it would happen to them at least once in all these years they’ve known each other.

So why does Motoya feel like he’s being lied to?

*

Sakusa’s always had a particular way of lying. He didn’t do it often which made it easy to spot. The last time Motoya can recall was their first trip to the coffee shop the he would eventually come to think of as _theirs_. 

It was a cool spring day, with cherry blossoms hanging low overhead and the streets full of people who were making time to admire them. Sakusa wanted to thank Motoya for his trouble after the night of the party, probably, though he hadn’t admitted as much. It was just his way—he didn’t like feeling like he owed people. 

Motoya, for his part, was all too happy to take up any offer Sakusa passed his way regardless of the motive behind it. That’s how they’d ended up shoulder to shoulder but not quite touching, moving together through Hiroshima to the little hole in the wall Sakusa’d decided on.

“This is nice,” Motoya said when they dropped into the booth, looking about the room to admire the quaint decorations. “How’d you find this place again?”

Sakusa was looking seriously at the menu on the wall. His brow furrowed deeper at the question. “Someone on campus mentioned it,” he said. 

Motoya stared. Sakusa continued to study the menu.

The lie lingered in the space between them, and neither of them addressed it. Not that day, and not ever.

*

Sakusa promises to make it up to him the next time he’s in town if Motoya can manage to get out of the postseason exhibition matches. It takes some work, but Motoya’s always been willing to get his hands dirty and put his back into it if it meant getting a little more time with Sakusa, so he makes it happen.

April comes, and Sakusa texts him to let him know he’s on his way into town and to confirm they’ve still got plans to meet for coffee. Staring at the text, Motoya is struck with a sudden realization: this is the first time Sakusa’s ever come to _him_. In the last year they’ve spent apart, Motoya’s taken every chance he could to get to Hirakata City; now, Sakusa’s coming back home to him.

He sits on his bed, buries his face in his hands, and for the first time in his life allows himself to be consumed with hope. 

Hope is a tender thing, far more fragile than flowers. In a lifetime spent hopelessly in love with one person after another after another and then years and years on end of loving only Kiyoomi Sakusa like it was the single most natural thing in the world, Motoya has never allowed the seed of hope to take root. And then, in all the time it takes to read a single text message, hope makes a home for itself in Motoya’s chest and invades the garden with impunity.

He arrives at their coffee shop early. The only place he feels still and quiet and calm is in their booth, the one furthest from the door, where they’ve sat and drank together countless times before. Nothing about this place should feel new now, but something about the novelty of _today_ has rendered it completely different.

Motoya studies the shop and sips at a drink he orders to pass the time. There’s a half hour to go before he’s supposed to meet Sakusa here, and he wants to commit every detail of this place, on this day, to memory.

He drinks his latte to the dregs, gets up, throws it away, and when he turns back to the booth, he sees him: dark eyes, dark curls, pale skin. He’s little more than skin and bone and eyebags. There are cherry blossoms in his hair, and Motoya knows too well that means he’ll be ang—

Someone presses into Sakusa’s side, nudging him, and Sakusa stumbles a little mid-step. His small mouth is obscured by the face mask he’s wearing, but Motoya knows the set of his brow and the crinkle of his eye like he knows his own name; he’s only seen Sakusa’s smile a handful of times in his life, and he’s long-since tucked the tells of it away for safekeeping.

There’s a ballcap pulled down low over Atsumu’s head, but Motoya knows him on sight anyway. He knows too well the year-round tan he sports and the sharpness of his cocksure grin and the way he’s always stood next to Sakusa without an ounce of fear or care. 

Motoya takes a seat.

He thinks he might pass out.

Is it possible to die of disappointment? 

Atsumu tugs his sleeve down over his hand and opens the door to the coffee shop in a single, vicious tug. The warm lilt of his accent fills the room, but Motoya’s incapable of piecing the sounds together into recognizable words. His stomach is swooping. A chill has pierced its way through his chest. If he listens closely enough, he might hear it whistling through the crocuses.

Sakusa sees Motoya. Motoya sees Sakusa see him. The second stretches on forever and passes in an instant.

And in that time, Atsumu reaches up and plucks a cherry blossom right out of Sakusa’s hair. Sakusa doesn’t even flinch.

“ _Yeesh_ ,” Atsumu complains. “Can’t take you anywhere, can I?”

Sakusa rolls his eyes. There’s a tightness in his brow, though—a precursor of another smile. He ducks his head and says something Motoya can’t catch from across the cafe, and Atsumu takes his time picking one petal after another right out of Sakusa’s hair. In public. In _their_ coffee shop.

Envy pours in from the fresh hole in Motoya’s chest. It burns its way into his bloodstream, and sets his veins to boil. He picks at the collar of his shirt, feverish with the desire to be anywhere but here.

It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing. Makes. Sense.

He scrambles to pull his wits together and steel them in the time it takes Sakusa and Atsumu to cross the room to the booth. There’s a moment of hesitation and a look passes between them before Atsumu rolls his eyes and drops into the booth first, sliding all the way in against the wall. 

If anything, he looks even less happy to be here than Motoya; he makes no effort to hide the way he sizes Motoya up, looking him over from eyebrows to sternum once and then again, more slowly. A wide lie of a smile stretches across his face. The lie is, _I’m a decent human being capable of normal human interaction._

Motoya’s always been a nice guy. An adaptable guy. The sort of person who knows what other people expect from him. The type of romantic who could make himself into whatever the object of his affections might like best. He can’t think of a single opinion he holds to the exclusion of all others; he can’t think of a subject he’s passionate enough to defend to the bitter end. He’s a crocus-grower. Cheerfulness is simply in his nature.

He’s not sure he’s ever really, truly hated anyone in all his life. But as he watches Sakusa slide into Atsumu’s side of the booth, as he takes in the way their arms touch shoulders to elbows without either of them twitching away, Komori feels sick with hatred.

In this moment, he hates Atsumu Miya passionately, even as he knows it’s futile—Atsumu runs on hatred, after all. He takes it in like a car takes fuel or normal people take food. It sustains him, on some twisted level. 

Motoya sees the conversation he’s about to have coming from a mile away, and he wants nothing to do with it. He doesn’t want to nod along and accept their relationship. He feels nauseated thinking about witnessing the telltale signs of Sakusa’s affections. He only feels worse thinking about seeing Atsumu return them.

 _How long?_ he wants to know. _How long?_ he thinks again and again, acutely aware that he’ll never have the courage to ask.

 _How long_ has Sakusa had room in his heart for someone like this? _How long_ has he been able to touch and be touched in return? _How long_ has he been cultivating these soft looks he keeps casting when he thinks Atsumu isn’t looking? _How long_ did they plan this, coming up to ambush Motoya in the place he felt happiest in the world, no doubt expecting his congratulations?

The story comes out slowly, and he’s helpless to do anything but listen: they’re not sure when it started. Maybe from the first set. But they danced and danced and danced around each other in high school, through texts and at training camp and throughout tournaments, every look and challenge issued—the ones Motoya never could quite understand—a subtle flirtation. 

It was Atsumu who Sakusa first talked to about not going pro. It was Atsumu who Sakusa meant to call the night of Kuroo’s party. It was Atsumu who first suggested the Black Jackals. And every step of the way, Sakusa had considered other options. But there Motoya was, quietly nudging Sakusa back on the path without even meaning to or at least tacitly accepting the logic Sakusa presented to him. Thinking, all the while, that everything was part of some grand plan that ended in a world where he and Sakusa could be Motoya-and-Kiyoomi at last.

How fucking naive. 

Even the shop, this shop, had come to Sakusa by way of a Miya; apparently Osamu ate a danish here that changed his life several years ago, and Atsumu had passed the details along to Sakusa in a latenight phone call. It was that thin connection between them, not a sense of duty to repay Motoya’s kindness after Kuroo’s party, that had driven Sakusa to invite Motoya to this shop all those years ago. 

That detail, which is brought to light in a bickering little aside from the overall story of their relationship, hurts worst of all.

Eventually Sakusa climbs to his feet and says, “I’ll get drinks,” like that’s a thing he’s ever volunteered to do in his life. When Atsumu opens his mouth, Sakusa says, “Americano, I know. What about you?” He directs this question at Motoya, who can only stare wide-eyed back at him.

 _How long_ has Sakusa gone without knowing Motoya’s regular coffee order? 

“Just a mocha,” he forces himself to say, like his heart isn’t hemorrhaging on the table right in front of him. “Hot.” 

Sakusa nods and turns to go. Atsumu does an admirable job of looking like he’s not watching him walk away. Motoya’s stomach spasms, threatening to toss itself up. 

“I’m—” he starts to say, but his voice fails him. He swallows and asks, “Is it stuffy in here? Or is that just me?” 

Atsumu looks about as disinterested in that question as a person could possibly be. “Why’d you order a hot drink if you already feel hot?” he asks, expression twisted as if to say, _What sort of shitty sense of judgment have you got?_

Motoya’d rather not hear it, thanks.

“I’m going to get some air,” he says, sliding out of his side of the booth. “I’ll be right back.”

“Whatever,” says Atsumu, his nose already buried in his phone. It’s the only thing in this whole shop other than Sakusa that he seems to deem worthy of his attention.

Outside, the air is thick with the sweet smell of spring. The cherry blossoms are in full bloom, and a gentle breeze carries errant ones along the sidewalks. The sun stretches out overhead, warming the world below, but Motoya stands frozen solid even in its gentle rays.

He’s been in love with Sakusa for so many seasons, but all of them had been vibrant and warm. Now, try as he might, he can’t feel the familiar stirring of crocuses when he takes a deep and steadying breath. He can’t even sense their roots anymore. 

Winter’s come for him at last. The cold cuts to the bone.


	2. Lily of the Valley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> But the truth—the harshest and simplest truth, the truth Hanahaki taught him first and foremost—is that the world isn’t kind or unkind. It simply is. And to thrive, all anyone can do is grow around it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What you're about to read is the **rewrite** of the story found in chapter one. Essentially, this is the version of A Tender Perennial that I would have written if I'd written it exactly one week later, after the release of Chapter 394 which revealed that Komori and Sakusa are actually cousins. 
> 
> These stories are the same stories. They have the same plot progression, and they follow the same timeline. But the relationship explored in them is vastly different, and the relationship the narrator has with Hanahaki is too. I wanted to write a story that would be satisfying for those of you who read the original story and anyone who hasn't. 
> 
> I can't express what the response to the original piece was like for me. I am so grateful to everyone who read, commented, and left kudos on this piece. Thank you for appreciating this little piece of my heart. I hope you enjoy the rewrite as much as I do.

_Lily of the valley, a common and hearty and sweet-smelling garden perennial, boasts six to eight waxy nodding tepals, lance-shaped leaves, and clusters of red or orange berries. Over generations, various cultivars have been developed. Find_ convallaria majalis _plain? Perhaps you’ll warm to it in shades of pink (Rosea) or with striped leaves (Albostriata), in a larger size (G_ _éant_ _de Fortin), or with twice as many flowers (Flore Pleno)._

_Regardless of the variant, plant its rhizomes in early spring when the air is sweet with growth and winter’s chill is but a distant memory. As the days start to lengthen, so too will these stems. Keep the soil moist and partially shaded and by summer’s end, pips will have formed. Come November, at the turn of the seasons, the plant will slip into dormancy and for sixteen weeks it will sleep._

_In_ Hanakotoba _, lily of the valley means_ ‘ _sweet’. Perhaps, then, it dreams of sweet things: tender touches between lovers, babies’ giggles, an early morning full-body stretch in a pale patch of sunlight. And, perhaps, it brings that sweetness with it into late spring, when its buds begin to blossom and its berries grow bulbous and heavy and ripe._

_But the world is so much less sweet than dreams may promise. And so too is lily of the valley, which grows strong and tall and poisonous from root to stem to berry to tepal. Consumption of any part of lily of the valley has been known to cause, albeit rarely: abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and irregular heartbeats—a reminder, of sorts, that its beauty is best admired from a distance._

— an excerpt from _Hanahaki’s Guide to Gardening_ (1962)

*

Tsukasa inherited the world from his mother. 

His dad didn’t talk about her much—couldn’t, actually. Just thinking about her was sometimes enough to lock him into a staring contest with the wall for hours on end. But other family members were there to tell him, _You look just like your mom when you cry,_ and, _You like sports almost as much as your mom did,_ and _, Your mom liked to keep things nice and neat too._

It didn’t stop there, either. His build, his gait, his hands; his nose, his ears, his smile. His favorite color and food and weather. Sometimes his relatives joked that he had so much of his mother in him that they couldn’t be sure he even _had_ a dad. 

Then, on the cusp of his first winter in high school, Tsukasa made the trip across Tokyo to compete at a regional qualifying match where he met a dark-haired, dark-eyed boy with a tone flat as a board and a lint roller the size of his head—an exact match to Tsukasa’s. 

It wasn’t love. 

It wasn’t love when Sakusa walked away that afternoon, his curious teammate looking back over his shoulder at Tsukasa as they returned to the gym. It wasn’t love when Tsukasa later sat in the stands and watched Sakusa receive ball after ball after ball with skill and tenacity. Even when he saw the spin Sakusa put on his spikes and a feeling like wonder rose up inside of him and his fingers itched with the _need_ to toss—even then, it wasn’t love. 

But somewhere between the long ride home, a perfunctory shower, and the hard-earned nap he gave into in the early evening, the matted feelings in his chest were combed out, strung up, and spun into love.

And later, between one passing thought about Kiyoomi Sakusa and the next, he hacked up a root system over the dinner table. 

His lungs burned. His throat hurt. There was a sweetness on his tongue and a fine film over his teeth that he couldn’t place or name. For a long time, he stared at the spit-soaked rhizomes and said nothing at all, caught between shame and pain and awe. The pips were brown and white and pink while his face, splotchy with tears— _You look just like your mom when you cry—_ was tomato red. 

Eventually, his father cleared his throat. He used a finger to push his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. His expression was serious. His expression was always serious. Tsukasa couldn’t look at him without humiliation twisting in his gut. 

“Sorry son,” said his dad. “You got that from me.”

*

The memory of that night remains crisp as ever in Tsukasa’s mind. He thinks about it on days like this, when autumn starts to shiver at the seams and winter first takes hold. Time and distance hasn’t changed much at all _—_ not the memory and not his feelings. Six years later and here he is with a garden for a rib cage and nothing to show for it but the terrible hope: _Maybe today, everything will change._

A rare break in his schedule’s given him the chance to escape Kariya for a long weekend, and the choice of where to go had been obvious. Osaka has everything he could want: luxurious hotels, world class restaurants, and Kiyoomi Sakusa, in the flesh.

Later, Komori will arrive and Tsukasa will join him in the stands to watch Sakusa play. But for now, Tsukasa slumps into the park bench he’s sprawled across and waits, bright-eyed and alert, scanning the faces of strangers as they pass, imagining what strange and wonderful lives they must have outside of this park. 

Where do they park their strollers at night? What bills are they agonizing over? Do they know what it’s like to be filled to the brim with leaves and tepals and yearning? Do any of them see a kindred spirit when they catch Tsukasa looking their way from across the manicured lawn? 

“You’re early.”

Sakusa casts a long shadow across the bench, and Tsukasa aims a cheery smile back up at him, unphased. 

“I had time,” he says. “Did I interrupt something? You don’t _have_ to entertain me, you know.”

Of course Sakusa knows. That’s what makes his appearance such a thrill. Tsukasa, too eager to linger any longer in Kariya, had arrived in Osaka nearly three hours earlier than he’d been expected. And here Sakusa is, just the same—looking grumpy and rumpled in an ill-fitting burgundy t-shirt, rendered impossibly human. He might have walked right out of Tsukasa’s dreams.

“I’m taking the grumpy silence as a ‘ _No, senpai_ ,’” Tsukasa teases, just for the delight of seeing Sakusa’s face twist into a scowl.

This one means: _I’ve never called you senpai, and you_ know _it._

“No,” he says, gaze sliding away, hands disappearing into the pockets of his heavy coat. “You didn’t interrupt anything.”

“Great!” Tsukasa crows, eyes crinkling. Happiness incarnate. “What’s good to eat around here?”

“You ask that every time you visit,” Sakusa says, warily eyeing a family of four walking down the path towards them. 

“One of these days I think you’ll surprise me,” Tsukasa insists. “I don’t want to miss it, when it happens.”

Sakusa rolls his eyes and edges closer to the bench as the family passes. Judging by the line of his jaw, he’s frowning. Considering his options, probably, even though they both know how this will go because it’s gone this way a hundred times before: 

Tsukasa asks about dine-in options; Sakusa looks miserable at the idea; Tsukasa offers to buy groceries and cook out of Sakusa’s kitchen; Sakusa, looking as close to relieved as he ever does off a volleyball court, accepts. It’s a win-win scenario. He gets to stay away from public spaces, and Tsukasa gets to revel in being welcomed inside, allowed to handle Sakusa’s dishes, and fantasize vividly about confessing his feelings over dinner. What a neat, romantic little bookend it would be, if only he could summon the courage.

He starts to say, “Maybe we could—”

But Sakusa says, “I got groceries yesterday. No need to shop.”

Tsukasa stares. After a beat, he beams. His smile must be beatific, if Sakusa’s groan is anything to go by. 

“Sakusa!” he cheers, jumping to his feet. “You got your place ready for us? That’s so unexpectedly thoughtful of you!”

“I didn’t,” Sakusa sighs. He closes his eyes and tugs at the too-tight collar of his t-shirt, like it’s suddenly uncomfortable. “Are we going? Or—”

“We’re going, we’re going!” Tsukasa hurries to say, before the invitation can be ripped away. “I’m thinking—” he tilts his head and hums exaggeratedly, “—onigiri?” 

Sakusa scowls. This one means: _You’re not as funny as you think you are._ But Tsukasa can’t be bothered to stop laughing as he scrambles to follow Sakusa’s spitefully long strides out of the park, across the street, and up to his apartment. 

  
  


*

After his diagnosis, Tsukasa had to drag himself out bed three times a week and cross Itachiyama’s campus in the hazy morning light to the infirmary. There, the school nurse would poke and prod him, stick a spirometer in his mouth, and document the progression of his condition on a single blue form while he did his best not to fall asleep on the examination table.

The form was made up of words and phrases he only had the vaguest understanding of: peak expiratory flow, forced expiratory ratio, bronchodilator response, forced vital capacity, arterial blood gases. But he understood the most important part, which was marked with a single hurried check mark by each appointment’s end: _Asymptomatic, Sports Permitted_.

There’d been no reappearance of the waxy, cone-shaped pips since that November night when Tsukasa coughed up all but his heart onto his dinner plate.

On the first day of his second year, he brought his completed form to practice, tucked with care into a manila folder. He wore his hair as he always had, used the same duffle he always had, and dressed exactly as he always had. He was what he had always been: his mother’s son, a fastidious creature of habit. It had led him to the title of Best Setter at the Youth Olympics. It had earned him a spot on Itachiyama’s starting lineup as a first year. It had brought him the quiet approval of his peers and upperclassmen and teachers and coaches alike. 

Sometimes he dreamed of these things, tucked away in all the separate boxes he meticulously relegated them to: friends here and teammates there and mentors elsewhere, never combined, never overflowing into one another. And ever since Sakusa had looked at him all those months ago—approval sketched in the hard lines of his pretty face—Tsukasa had dreamt of another box, dark and heavy and covered by a lid he dare not lift. 

On that crisp spring day all those years and years ago, Tsukasa made his way down the narrow paths that lead to the Itachiyama boys’ volleyball gym. The world was made of sunshine and cherry blossoms; the smell was sweet. It was a day meant to be remembered. He took the stairs two at a time and stopped in the doorway.

Within him, there was a box. It was heavy and dark. Inside, something that had been dormant began to stretch.

The sun shone bright against his back, warm at first. Then hot. Then too hot.

“Iizuna-san,” said Kiyoomi Sakusa in a flat, dry tone. 

At the sight of him, Tsukasa’s breath caught—literally. Something trapped it in the pit of his chest, and all at once his eyes began to water. He stumbled back, one step and then another. 

“Iizuna?” someone asked, barely audible over the rush of blood in Tsukasa’s ears.

Within him, there was a box, heavy and dark. Inside, something was stretching, reaching, longing for the sunshine just on the other side. And a little bit of love.

He smacked his chest with the broad side of a curled fist. Then, with tears on his face and the whole team watching, he coughed up the box’s contents right onto the court. White and pink tepals spilled over his lips; red and orange berries scattered; leaves like lances—too dull to cut—fell to the hardwood, slick with spit. 

And above it all: Sakusa.

Tsukasa felt his gaze on the back of his neck, hotter than the sun, heavier than his heart. If the world were kind, he thought bitterly, the ground would have torn itself open and swallowed him whole right then and there.

But the truth—the harshest and simplest truth, the truth Hanahaki taught him first and foremost—is that the world isn’t kind or unkind. It simply is. And to thrive, all anyone can do is grow around it.

*

Ten years.

Tsukasa’s been in love with Kiyoomi Sakusa for nearly a decade. He’s mostly asleep, brushing his teeth in halfhearted circles and scratching his belly, when it occurs to him. The face in the mirror looks exhausted. There are circles pressed deep and dark beneath his bloodshot eyes, and he tries to determine what’s aged him worse—time or Hanahaki? It’s impossible to tell; by now, nearly half his life has been measured in tepals and rhizomes and dormancy periods.

“Fuck,” he says around a mouthful of toothpaste. 

When he spits, the foam is tinted green from the leaves he wheezed up barely half an hour ago. He twists the faucet on and doesn’t watch the water spin away down the drain. To watch would be to wonder, and wondering never gets him anywhere fast. He knows exactly how far he’ll get, exactly what question will keep him awake for hours on end:

Why Kiyoomi Sakusa? 

Of all the people in the world, Tsukasa had to fall in love with the prickliest, grumbliest guy in Japan. Possibly the whole eastern hemisphere. At barely sixteen, when he was still soft and malleable, he’d exchanged a handful of words with Sakusa over a pair of lint rollers and somehow walked away entirely reformed. To this day, Sakusa’s dark gaze remains pressed to his soul, an artist’s signature. 

And here he is, ten years later, chest bursting with blossoms, no closer to understanding his love than he had been back then.

Trying to uproot the feelings had been a lesson in futility. Consciously _not thinking_ about Sakusa only brought him to the forefront of his mind. And anytime he’s managed to really, truly stop thinking about him, his standing hospital appointments or semi-regular calls with Komori have been more than enough to remind him: somewhere in the world—miles and miles away from Tsukasa’s apartment in Kariya—Kiyoomi Sakusa was going about his life, probably scowling into the middle distance, and Tsukasa no longer knew a version of himself that wasn’t helplessly, terribly in love with him.

How silly. How stupid. How stubborn. 

Trying to chase the feeling away with the press of someone else’s hands or mouth was no good either. If Sakusa had ever touched him like that, Tsukasa might have managed to rewrite the memories and rewire his brain, reconditioning himself so _anyone else_ could do in Sakusa’s stead. Instead, as Tsukasa chased kiss after kiss from stranger after stranger, he found himself wondering, _Is this how Sakusa would kiss me?_

In one particularly humiliating incident, he’d coughed berries and tepals into a pretty middle blocker’s mouth. The guy had been put on bedrest for three days after due to stomach pains, and Tsukasa hadn’t kissed anyone ever since. 

Now, he wanders listlessly about his apartment, navigating his nighttime routine on autopilot, and wonders—even though he knows, he knows, he knows that wondering gets him nowhere fast—what he’ll do if Sakusa never loves him back. In all likelihood, Tsukasa will keep loving him anyway. What else could he do?

As answers go, it’s better than nothing. He plucks it right from the memory of a long-distant conversation, fully formed and oh-so-pretty. Logically, it makes a twisted sort of sense: if he can’t remember a past version of himself who didn’t love Sakusa, how could he imagine a future one?

It’s no surprise when he rolls out of bed three hours later to cough his heart up into a wastebasket, but expecting it doesn’t make it hurt any less. 

*

He doesn’t remember much about high school outside of volleyball; he was an average student made remarkable by the list of athletic accomplishments attached to his transcript. By the time his second year came around, Tsukasa had run out of places to put his awards. Whispers of V.League recruitment had grown louder after his performance in the Spring Tourney, where his sweaty and proud face had been broadcast across all of Japan. 

Once his condition became symptomatic, the whispers stopped. 

It wasn’t his imagination. The rumor mill on the Tokyo circuit worked overtime most nights, and the community was small enough that it never took long for an ember to be fanned into an inferno. _Tsukasa Iizuna’s coughing up flowers these days—_ that was the sort of news that barely needed kindling to catch.

“Your condition isn’t uncommon,” Coach said in that same no-nonsense tone as always. The school nurse, who stood stiff and formal at his side, nodded along. “But, I’ll be frank with you: it’s not exactly _appealing,_ either. No team wants to lose momentum, a point, or a set because they’ve got a player coughing their heart out on center court.”

The implication was, _I don’t want to lose because of you_. 

Tsukasa’s heart was a stone. He said, “I understand.” 

The nurse cleared her throat. “Now that the dormancy period is over,” she said, “you’ll need to visit a hospital for some more tests. There are procedures that can be done to keep the growth controlled. This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of your athletic career.”

“But it doesn’t _not_ mean that, either,” Coach said with a hard edge to his tone. “At the end of the day, your performance is what matters. If you can’t perform because of this, that’s that.”

Tsukasa said, “I understand.”

The walk back to his dorm might have taken five minutes; it might have taken an hour. He has no memory of the path he took, the sights along the way, or what, exactly, he thought about with each heavy step. Dread, unfamiliar and nauseating, rose up from somewhere within him.

When he shouldered open the door to the dorm building and sulked inside, Sakusa was already there, standing just within the foyer. His hands were sunk deep in his pockets, and his expression was pinched in a way that seemed to clearly say, _Existence, at present, is a pain_. 

“Sakusa,” said Tsukasa.

A beat. “Iizuna-san,” said Sakusa. “You weren’t at practice.”

The morning’s conversation had left a bitterness in Tsukasa’s mouth. He ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth and sucked, trying to taste the feeling away. “I may not be at many practices, soon,” he admitted with an unhappy smile. “You didn’t miss me too much, did you?”

“I didn’t,” Sakusa said with certainty. They’d never played together, so it was to be expected, but a chill pierced Tsukasa’s chest all the same. “Why wouldn’t you be at practice?”

His expression had changed, subtly. Tsukasa wondered if this deeper, more deliberate furrow of his brow meant, _I’m annoyed by this conversation_ , or _I’m trying to understand_. 

“Hanahaki’s symptoms,” Tsukasa said, though the words felt like thorns in his mouth. “Now that I’m actually experiencing them, it’ll be hard to keep my performance up.”

The line of Sakusa’s brow softened, but his expression wasn’t soft. _Unimpressed_ was Tsukasa’s best guess. Then: _Understanding_? It was hard to say; he was a new student in this, the intricate language of Sakusa’s nonverbal cues and body language. It’d be a long time before he’d achieve fluency, but with dedication and close study he thought—hoped?—it might be possible, someday. Maybe.

He sighed. “You could at least _try_ to look a little sympathetic.”

Sakusa grimaced. “Why?”

It was such a bizarre, inhuman answer that Tsukasa couldn’t help but stand there, slack-jawed and struck stupid by it. “Excuse me?”

“You decided it’s over,” Sakusa said slowly, like he was explaining a simple idea to someone very young or very stupid. “So?”

The word hung in the air between them despite its weight.

Tsukasa couldn’t suppress a stunned, disbelieving laugh. “So _what_?” he asked ruefully. His eyes began to sting.

“If you don’t want it to be over, can’t you just work harder?”

Anger—hot and humiliated—shot through Tsukasa with the lethality of a downed powerline. “ _What_ ,” he all but snarled, still struggling to wrap his head around what he was hearing and around Sakusa’s nonplussed callousness. “Just—do you have any idea how hard I’m _already_ working? Would it kill you to show a little _empathy_ here?”

His voice was loud. His body felt feverish. His tears clung to his lashes. He was causing a scene. 

“You have to stay good to keep playing,” Sakusa said in that same, flat tone Tsukasa spent the last four months dreaming about—how had his tastes in romance gone so wrong?—“so if this makes you a worse player, then you have to work harder to make up for it. Or quit.”

He sounded like he couldn’t care less which option Tsukasa ultimately chose. Probably because he really and truly didn’t. Nothing in his posture or tone or passing moments of eye contact seemed to indicate any of this meant that much to him—certainly not enough that he’d lie about it.

And yet, some strange, nameless feeling had begun to grow in Tsukasa’s chest all the same, pushing out the dread and hopelessness that had begun to take root. 

“You know what,” he said, his smile a more honest thing—the one he knew from his reflection and from pictures of his mother alike. He straightened his posture, held his chin a little higher, and wiped away his tears. “You’re right. Your pep talks could use some work, but you’re right. Thanks, Sakusa.”

Sakusa turned his gaze to the floor and made a vague sound of acknowledgement. Tsukasa wanted to steal it from his mouth and bury it in the soft, tilled soil of his heart, and tend to it until it blossomed into a full sentence. Or just, _Tsukasa_ , said in Sakusa’s flat tone—even that much would be enough.

Just imagining it made his chest ache.

“You sure are something,” he said, making his way towards the stairs.

At the last possible moment, he glanced over his shoulder, wondering distantly what—or who—Sakusa might be waiting for, but he didn’t have a reason or the guts to ask. So up he went instead, taking the stairs two at a time until his chest shivered and burned, and he had to brace himself against a wall to cough tiny, spit-slick, bell-shaped flowers into his shaking hands.

  
  


*

A happy coincidence puts him back in Osaka in mid-January. Tomorrow, the Hornets will face the Black Jackals on the Jackals’ home turf, but tonight the stadium belongs to the university league, and no one on the court is drawing more attention or inspiring as much awe as Sakusa. 

As teammates, Tsukasa had come to appreciate Sakusa’s consistency as a receiver and his cleverness as a hitter. It was hard not to, seeing the way he threw himself into practice with a single-minded focus and an inhuman awareness of his body’s strengths and shortcomings. But being up close and in the action is very different from standing in the stands, shoulder-to-shoulder with an entire cheering section holding its breath for Sakusa’s next move.

During a technical timeout, Komori offers Tsukasa a beer and asks, “It’s weird, isn’t it?”

Tsukasa plays dumb. “What do you mean?” He takes a sip of the beer and hopes the glass hides his smile.

“Just—” Komori gestures at the court. “I don’t know. I got so used playing at his side or behind him that sometimes I forget how scary he is from other angles.”

“You might be the only person who can say he’s _ever_ forgotten how scary Sakusa is,” Tsukasa teases, licking foam off his top lip. “I get it, though. He’s intense.”

“He’s a _nightmare_ ,” Komori corrects him, with feeling. “I’m having flashbacks to middle school.”

They laugh, and in no time at all the game picks up again. Tsukasa downs the beer in record time, trying to chase away the dozens of questions he has about exactly _what_ Sakusa was like back in middle school. He’s picked up bits and pieces over the years—mostly around Sakusa’s peculiar and undefinable relationship with Ushiwaka—but it’s never been enough.

He no longer knows a version of himself that hasn’t wanted to know every version of Sakusa, past and present and future. 

But asking would feel like confessing, and he’s not sure he trusts Komori with the truth of the matter. So he drinks his beer, lends his voice to the cheering crowd with every point Sakusa saves or steals, and pretends he doesn’t know what it’s like to lay awake at night and _yearn_.

The game ends in a win for Sakusa’s team. Victory is bittersweet for everyone in the stadium. How wonderful it is to win; how tragic it is that the night is over. The electricity in the air around them burns itself out as fans collect their things and leave their seats. Tsukasa and Komori linger while the crowd trickles out, making small talk until they sense enough time has passed.

Then they make their way out of the stadium and down to the hallways leading to the teams’ locker rooms. Every step feeds a fantasy for Tsukasa, one where Sakusa sees him and smiles, says his name, and thanks him for coming. He is simultaneously, painfully aware of just how out of character that would be and of how badly he longs for it anyway. If Komori notices that he’s gone quiet, he doesn’t mention it.

“Whaddya mean ya ‘dunno’?” someone demands, their voice lilting and familiar. 

Komori stops midstep, brows raised. “Well _that’s_ unexpected,” he says, a smile stretching across his face, eyes fixed down the hall.

Tsukasa looks despite himself. He’d be able to pick that voice out of any crowd, anyday. In the otherwise-quiet hallway, it’s as hard to miss as a brick to the face. 

To no one’s surprise, Atsumu Miya had been recruited to the V.League Division 1 right out of high school. Tsukasa only sees him at matches nowadays, and seeing him now is surreal—like Atsumu isn’t meant to exist off the court. But here he is just the same, smirking up at Sakusa and bundled in a heavy winter coat with the collar popped up around his ears. 

“Atsumu!” Komori calls, giving them away. 

Atsumu casts a sidelong glance their way, and a muscle in his jaw works. Then he looks back at Sakusa. “I’m serious, ya know. You act all—” he gestures widely, vaguely, “—like this. But you’n’I both know it’s the best fit for ya. Why wontcha just _admit it_ already?”

Sakusa’s eyes narrow. “It’s not your choice to make.” His voice is hard.

“Like hell it isn’t,” Atsumu snaps. When Sakusa doesn’t flinch he huffs, squares his shoulders, and says, “Whatever. Be stubborn. See if I care.” Then he storms away, steps echoing down the hall until, eventually, they’re swallowed by the quiet.

Tsukasa watches Sakusa watch him go until Sakusa’s gaze slips to Komori and then, finally, Tsukasa.

No smile. No name-saying. No gratitude. Expecting it doesn’t make it hurt any less.

“He’s still at that?” Komori clicks his tongue, but it’s hard to tell if it’s in admiration or disapproval. “Talk about persistent.”

“What’s going on?” Tsukasa asks. 

Sakusa shakes his head and offers no answer, so Komori rolls his eyes and explains, “Atsumu’s been trying to get Sakusa for the Jackals. But recruitment hasn’t even _started_ yet. And Sakusa’s got months left before graduation.” 

Tsukasa’s stomach promptly ties itself into a knot. “Oh,” he says. He looks to Sakusa who’s staring blankly at the opposite wall, probably lost in thought. “Well… Are you?” 

Sakusa shifts and turns to meet Tsukasa’s eyes. “I’m not thinking about it yet,” he says. “Right now, I’m focusing on what’s in front of me.” 

It’s a moment that’s singularly perfect. Tsukasa might as well be fifteen again—soft, malleable, and reformed by Sakusa’s dark gaze and a handful of words. It’s a memory he knows he’ll carry with him forever, that he’ll plant close to his heart even though he knows too well the sort of pain it’ll blossom into later. 

“That’s the way to do it,” he says with a grin, his mood buoyed. “One milestone at a time, that’s what I always say.” 

Sakusa scowls at him. _You do_ not _always say that,_ it seems to say. 

And, oh, how wonderful it is to be known. 

*

For Tsukasa, Atsumu’s always been a sensitive subject.

At every training camp Tsukasa ever attended, gossip was a sort of currency that could be traded for friendships, extra helpings of dessert, or more of the same. Its value was ever-changing and determined on its usefulness, its juiciness, and how close a source you got it from.

The winter of his second year, he and Sakusa and Komori attended the All-Japan Youth Training Camp, where the competition was high, the challenges and challengers were unforgiving, and the gossip was mostly centered on the three of them.

A single school boasting three representatives was, to be fair, an impressive feat in and of itself. 

Sakusa’s wrists had been more or less legendary since his debut on the middle school level three years prior; even now they seemed to inspire wonder and bitterness in equal measure. Worse was the way he stood so confidently at Ushiwaka’s side, the quiet familiarity between the two of them strange, intimidating, and unignorable. Komori was an anomaly unto himself: ever-smiling, ever-digging, ever-unbothered by the silent behemoths he spent most of his time with.

Any other year, the pair of them would have been at the center of the storm. But instead it was Tsukasa alone in the calm as whispers raged around him—

_I thought he wasn’t going to be able to play anymore,_ they said. _What sort of beast does this guy have to be to_ still _be playing?_ they asked. _Maybe he got over it, who knows,_ they figured. 

His own feelings on the subject were complicated—not that anyone asked—and picking his way through them was like trying to pull himself through brambles. So whenever possible, he ignored them altogether.

Complicating matters, though, was another rumor: _They say his sets are technical perfection—is that even possible?_

While Tsukasa and Komori and Sakusa and—by association—Ushiwaka stood tall against the rumors like mountains against the wind, Atsumu Miya was the flame that simply grew taller and stronger in the wake of it. A first year with his hair bleached yellow-blonde and a sharp, cocksure grin—Tsukasa’s first impression of Atsumu was that he was the sort to look a guy right in the face and say, _I dare ya to underestimate me_. 

In truth, though, Atsumu didn’t say much that winter.

He took to the court quietly, assessed his teammates with a critical eye, and—without ever saying anything more than their names—put up toss after toss after toss with the most perfect form Tsukasa had ever seen. 

More impressive was the way he seemed to draw out a similar level of perfection in his hitters. Any good setter had a similar effect on his teammates—Tsukasa included. But objectively knowing that and facing Atsumu Miya on the court were two very different things. Sakusa’s form had never been more beautiful; Ushiwaka’s palm had never connected quite so loud. _Is that even possible?_ the rumor rattled about in Tsukasa’s head even as the truth of it was laid bare on the court.

Envy. It sprouted up from somewhere deep within. He didn’t have the strength to uproot it.

“Is there something wrong with the food?” asked Sakusa.

They were sitting as they had for every meal: the three Itachiyama representatives at one table, with the cousins side by side and Tsukasa across from Sakusa. It was an arrangement that flirted with disaster; at any moment he could look up, meet Sakusa’s eyes, and breathe out a bouquet between them. God forbid their shoes brush beneath the table; there was no telling what floral faux pas he’d commit then.

“It’s fine!” Tsukasa hurried to say. Komori nodded, his cheeks stuffed nearly to bursting, but Sakusa still looked less than convinced—Tsukasa was slowly learning the subtleties of his grimaces. “I just remembered that I have an appointment with the physician tonight, and I really don’t like getting stuff shoved down my throat. That’s all.”

Sakusa edged his bowl away with the back of his wrist, clearly not in a risk-taking kind of mood. 

“Anyone sittin’ here?” 

Atsumu didn’t wait for an answer. He dropped heavily into the seat next to Tsukasa. He didn’t have any food with him.

“You’ve got a real good sense for your hitters, huh?” he asked Tsukasa. “Question for ya: why do ya favor the left so much?” 

He was close enough that Tsukasa could smell something sour on his breath—umeboshi, maybe?—and his gaze was unwavering, even when Tsukasa began to fidget, trying to come up with an appropriate lie.

The truth was a wound. Tsukasa had, at some point, come to understand that Sakusa was slightly more comfortable on the left side of the court; his line shots were straighter, his cross shots were sharper. When Sakusa was on the left, the point was theirs to take; all Tsukasa had to do was deliver the ball to him.

Admitting that he’d associated victory as a whole with the left side of the court, as Sakusa-on-the-left, would tear the wound open, and he’d be left bleeding his feelings out for the world to see. Frankly, he preferred the flowers.

“Who knows,” he said. “I guess, when it comes down to it, that’s just what I favor.”

Atsumu considered this. A muscle in his jaw worked, like he was chewing on the thought.

“That’s way less cool than I’d hoped,” he finally said, deflating. “Less helpful, too.”

Across the table, Sakusa made a sound like a scoff. Atsumu swiveled his attention towards him, and his eyebrows lifted—like he hadn’t realized Sakusa was there until that moment.

“Hey!” he said, turning his body fully towards him. “Your wrists are real freaky! Were ya just born that way or didja have some super secret training to get ‘em all bendy like that?” 

Tsukasa had the vague impression that Atsumu was both a force of nature—one not to be reckoned with—and a curious child, the sort that learned the world mouth-first, tasting everything it had to offer without considering the risks.

Sakusa’s expression was sour. He said nothing at all.

“ _Yeesh_ ,” Atsumu complained, eyes rolling. “Can’t blame a guy for askin’.”

If only hating Atsumu had come as easy as fearing him. Instead, Tsukasa had to bury his smile behind a hand until Sakusa turned that pinched expression _his_ way. This look was somehow different from the dozens and dozens Tsukasa had come to see over the last year; if he had to guess, this one said, _Get us out of here or I’m going to hurt someone_.

So he said, “It was nice to meet you, Miya, but our coach asked us to do nightly check-ins…”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” said Atsumu, waving his hand dismissively like he knew when he was getting brushed-off and didn’t care enough to hear the excuse. “But don’t call me Miya. Just Atsumu, got it?”

“Atsumu,” Tsukasa confirmed.

“Us too?” asked Komori, rice on his lips.

“Everyone,” Atsumu said, expression serious.

So Tsukasa said, “Good night, Atsumu,” and left it at that.

*

An optimist might say, _At least you have volleyball._

And in some ways, they’d be right. Because for all that Tsukasa’s in love with someone who will probably never love him back, at least there’s little room for that sort of self-defeating attitude on the court. For volleyball alone, he can check his existential crises at the door, slide into a more confident, capable skin, and let instinct take over. The freedom’s like a drug; at least he has _some_ control over this, if nothing else—if not his own heart, his mind, his body.

But he’s never forgotten what his coach said all those years ago. He’s never forgotten, not for a second, that it all could be taken away from him at any moment. All it would take to end Tsukasa’s volleyball career is one point, one set, one match; then he’d be left with nothing to show for a lifetime of blood, sweat, and tears. 

So, fueled by his fear of failure above all else, Tsukasa throws everything he has into practicing. Being the creature of habit that he is, he’s never been fond of experimentation; instead, he commits himself to honing his technique. Each toss, more precise. Each dump, harder to predict. Each serve, meaner than the last. Through repetition, perfection. 

It’s not uncommon for him to linger long after the rest of the team has left for the locker rooms. What _is_ uncommon is Kai saying, “You’re playing like you’ve got the devil on your heels,” an hour after practice has ended.

The ball hits the ground. Tsukasa jerks his head to squint at the double doors where Kai stands, a duffle slung over his shoulder and his hair still damp from the shower. 

“You’re going to catch a cold,” he warns as he bends down to collect the ball. 

“Call it a day, already. You’ll kill yourself if you keep this up.”

Tsukasa laughs—he can’t help it. “I thought rookies were supposed to respect their elders.” 

Kai narrows his eyes. “Respectfully,” he says, tone flat, “you’re overexerting yourself.”

“I’m exerting myself,” Tsukasa concedes. “But _over_ exerting? Not quite.” 

He’s careful. He knows better than anyone that he can’t afford to lose volleyball. It’s all he’s ever had, even when he feels like he doesn’t have himself. If nothing else, he wants to stand on a court with Sakusa again. The fantasy drives him: if he works hard enough, he might know what that feeling’s like again. 

Kai sighs. “Well. Coach says don’t forget to lock up again or he’s taking the keys from you.”

Tsukasa stares at him as he leaves. Did he forget to lock up last night? His memories are a sweat-soaked blur of ball after ball and, later, flowers spinning around and around in water circling the shower drain.

Dammit. He throws the ball at the wall and wipes furiously at the sweat on his brow. Awareness of his body comes back slowly: the burning of his lungs, the aching of his knees, the throbbing of his feet. If he lingers long enough in his cooling sweat, the shivers will set in, so he collects the ball again, rolls the cart of them into a storage closet, and locks the door behind him when he leaves.

Halfway between the gym and the locker rooms, a cough echoes from down an intersecting hall, and Tsukasa stops in his tracks. A cough is almost always just a cough, but he knows intimately just how much more it might be. The coughing passes in a couple of minutes, and after a few more shuffling sounds, he hears footsteps. Little by little, they grow more and more distant until Tsukasa can’t hear anything at all. 

When he turns the corner at last, he sees Kai at the far end of the hall, duffel tucked against his side, a handful of waxy yellow petals in his wake. 

Dammit.

He considers the petals for a long time after, his frown heavy on his face. Surely he’d have known if the rookie had disclosed this before being signed. As setter, it’s his job to keep track of his hitters’ conditions; he ought to know if the guy’s operating at reduced lung capacity. But this is the first he’s heard of it which leaves two options: (1) he deliberately hid his condition and lied about it, or (2) it developed after his recruitment—sometime in the last year. 

If the former, Kai might be looking at an ugly legal battle. If the latter? 

Tsukasa doesn’t want to think about the implications of the latter. The last thing he wants to worry about is who’s got Ryosei Kai coughing up roses. 

And yet.

“Dammit,” he sighs, knocking his forehead against the cool, uncaring cinderblock wall. He kicks miserably at the little pile of petals like he can crush all that they represent with the toe of his sneaker. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

Unrequited love is a slow-growing weed. It creeps in and steals ground quietly, in centimeters, while choking out good and pretty feelings to plant in their stead an impossibly ugly truth: you may never be good enough. 

Even if he wanted to help Kai fight it, Tsukasa’s not sure he could. In the end, if—a big if, supported only by the shakiest, prettiest circumstantial evidence—Kai’s in love with _him_ , the kindest thing he can do is be cruel. And he knows too well just how cruel it is to know exactly what’s happening and not say a single word about it. 

Sakusa’s taught him that much, at least.

*

He remembers it like it was yesterday. 

It was the third round of the spring tournament at the end of his second year. His teammates, exhausted from their two games of the day, had packed up their things and made their way back towards the hotel. Only Tsukasa remained, a single blot of neon yellow in a neutral-toned crowd. 

On the court, Inarizaki was rapidly approaching match point in just two sets, and leading the charge was Atsumu Miya, his yellow-blonde hair as easy to track as a flame. With every point they took from their opponents, the crowd cheered Atsumu’s name, and the marching band that sat across the gymnasium seemed to swell entirely in his honor. 

Or, well. In the _Miyas’_ honor, maybe. 

It seemed impossible that this wouldn’t have come up during the week of training they spent together, but Tsukasa was sure he would have remembered hearing that there were two Atsumu Miyas out in the world, so the rumor must not have reached Tokyo at all. And yet here they were, proof positive: the Miya brothers. He hadn’t been close enough to see Atsumu’s twin’s face, but he could see enough similarities in the way they stood and the way they played. 

In some ways, he’d always known that volleyball was as much a game of luck as skill. Ushiwaka’s southpaw. Sakusa’s wrists. Height, in general. Watching the Miya twins play with such eerie synchronicity added another item to the growing list: what luck, indeed, to be born into the world with a partner by your side, someone to push you to grow—someone you could push back in turn. 

What luck.

“Iizuna-san,” Sakusa said, and Tsukasa jumped, startled. 

He frowned up at him. “I thought you went back to the hotel.”

Sakusa dropped into the seat beside him and slipped into his typical grouchy slouch. He said nothing, eyes fixed on the game below. It took Tsukasa too long to realize that he was staring—long enough that Sakusa’s gaze slid back to him, and his brow pinched in askance.

“You have a—” Tsukasa lied, reaching like he might pluck something out of Sakusa’s hair.

Sakusa flinched away. He picked at his hair himself, muttered, “Thank you,” and turned his attention back to the court.

For a long time, they were quiet. 

“He’s better than me,” Tsukasa said finally, voice low. 

Sakusa cast a sidelong look his way. After a while he said, “He is.”

It was the kindest act of cruelty he could have committed. Sakusa’s honesty was a knife sharp enough to cut, sharp enough to pierce Tsukasa, even at his toughest. 

“I wasn’t looking for agreement!” Tsukasa complained, doubling over in his seat, shoving the heels of his hands to his eyes. _Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry_ , he begged his body, like it hadn’t been fully mutinous for over a year now. 

“He takes too many risks,” Sakusa said next. “That will catch up to him, sooner or later.”

“His brother makes up for it,” Tsukasa sighed, uncurling himself to sit up straight again. “See the one with the gray hair? That’s the other Miya.”

Sakusa’s expression was complicated. “Two Miyas.”

“Rumor has it they’re twins.”

Over his face mask, Sakusa’s expression darkened like a storm cloud. His posture tightened somewhere between his neck and shoulders, and deep in his jacket pockets his fists balled tightly—Tsukasa could see it through the fabric.

“I know,” he sighed, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose to keep the blossoming headache at bay. “Trust me, I know.”

Another point stolen. The marching band surged. On the court, the Miyas clapped each other on the back, their smiles wide and bright enough to be seen from the stands—two distant, burning stars. 

“I won’t lose,” Tsukasa said, more to himself than anyone else. 

And, at his side, Sakusa nodded. 

*

The news breaks on a Monday in March just as the weather’s begun to turn and the air’s gone sweet with the promise of cherry blossoms, the wind whispering _soon, soon, soon_ as it rattles through their budding branches. 

Practice is especially tough; there’s just a few more matches left in the championship, and for now they’re still contending. The Adlers are the favorite by a mile, but Tsukasa feels close enough to taste it, close enough to imagine what life might be like if he could call himself a champion again. _Maybe then, everything will change_. 

With standard practices running them ragged, Tsukasa doesn’t feel the need to linger after the fact, though he feels Kai’s eyes on him just the same as he starts to collect his things. He hasn’t addressed it yet and has no plans to anytime soon, but the feeling is—unsettling. He’s never looked at another person and seen himself in them, and he’s not sure what to do about it now that he is.

Coach calls them into a huddle before they can disperse, and half the team looks vaguely nauseated, like they think he might order them into another round of jump squats before he lets them leave, but Tsukasa’s eyes go straight to the big yellow clipboard in his hands. He bounds over immediately despite his entire body aching like a ripe bruise.

“Are those the recruits?” he asks. 

Coach clicks his tongue. “Hold your horses.”

Which means _yes_. Tsukasa could vibrate out of his skin with anxiety. He’s been careful—so impossibly careful—not to pry about this. Over the last six months, Sakusa’s deflected every question about his presumed future with the V.League. Komori’s always been sure that he’d continue professionally, and Tsukasa’s envied his certainty. What he wouldn’t give to be able to know Sakusa in the same way, to be able to predict him so confidently. 

“Tell me we got Haiba,” someone says. 

A laugh. “Dream on. Haiba’s going to the Falcons. Everyone knows that.”

All eyes swing to Yaku, who narrows his eyes like he’s daring them to ask. He’s mostly swallowed by his ICS windbreaker, which Tsukasa is vaguely envious of—it’s from their new athleisure collection which Yaku, as a brand ambassador, gets early access to. Everyone else has to wait until fall to get theirs.

“Any word on Sakusa?” someone asks. 

The name drags Tsukasa sharply back into the conversation. He schools his expression into careful neutrality. _I don’t care._ He tells himself, again and again, a record skipping. 

“Sakusa was the last hold out,” says Coach. “As of last night, he’s in contract negotiations with the Jackals.”

Fuck. Expecting it doesn’t make it hurt any less. 

“Didn’t they _just_ pick up Bokuto?” Kai asks. 

Yaku looks like he’s swallowed a lemon. “The two of them and Atsumu Miya,” he says. “Chances are good someone ends up dead.”

Laughter catches and spreads amongst them. Tsukasa stands at the center of it all, eyes burning, trying to remember what it felt like to hope. 

*

He lost.

What he remembers of the game could fit in his hand: Sakusa on his right, Komori too far forward, the glare of the lights overhead, the weight of his body on an ankle that couldn’t hold it, watching the match point ball hit the court through a heavy veil of tears. 

He’d been prepared to lose _Best Setter_ to Atsumu Miya—that had already happened in the last two tournaments they’d competed in. But watching Inarizaki lose to Karasuno yesterday had rendered that a non-issue, so he’d come into the game thinking first, _we can win this_ , and then, _I can win this_.

In the end, he was wrong on both counts.

He was hoisted across the court after the game, steady even as he cried. Steady, when he made a promise to himself and to Sakusa and to whatever god was listening and to the earth itself: _I’m gonna finish that one with a smile._ Steady, when he doubled over in the hotel elevator and coughed up a whole damn garden fifty feet away from his door. 

His teammates helped with his room key, helped him into his bed, and—with trembling hands—helped him ice his ankle.

“Sorry, Captain,” they kept saying, again and again. Like they had let him down and not his body. 

He said, voice raw and blood on his tongue, “Hey, at least it wasn’t the Hanahaki, right?”

Neither of them smiled.

“Don’t worry about me,” he told them, reaching down to take the makeshift ice pack from their hands. “I’m gonna play at university, and I’ll make them notice me again.”

“And what about the flowers?” they asked not with words, but with their expressions.

Tsukasa thought back to Sakusa, drenched in sweat and staring up at the scoreboard with absolute neutrality. Acceptance. If there had ever been a fire inside of him, Tsukasa hadn’t seen it once since meeting him. Even as every other member on the team had clapped Tsukasa on the back and offered him sad smiles, Sakusa had kept his distance, not daring to touch even now. Even at the end.

“I’m due for a dormancy period anyway,” Tsukasa told his teammates. “With any luck, this time they’ll stay away.”

As if luck had ever had anything to do with it.

*

In another life, a luckier life, maybe Tsukasa’s a good person. Maybe without a flowerbed taking up vital space inside, he’d have room for a conscience. Maybe he’d be braver, capable of telling Sakusa how he feels. Maybe he’d be better equipped to resist temptation, capable of saying no to bad ideas even at his lowest. 

In this life, Tsukasa lets himself be shoved up against a formica countertop and tangles his fingers in Kai’s hair as Kai plants sloppy, desperate kisses to the line of his throat. In this life, he closes his eyes and pretends this is just any other fling, just a one night thing that won’t change anything come morning light. In this life, he takes and takes and takes knowing that it’s never going to be enough, with little regard for who he’s taking from.

Afterwards, when they’re sticky with sweat and panting side by side on Kai’s too-narrow bed, Tsukasa falls into old habits and wonders, _Would it feel this awkward with Sakusa?_

He rolls to his feet.

“You don’t have to go so soon,” Kai says, turning onto his stomach, arms curling around the pillow his cheek’s pressed to. The look he gives Tsukasa is warm, indulgent, brimming with goodness. 

“I really do,” Tsukasa says. He sighs and hangs his head. “Kai—look—”

Kai’s expression twists, warmth gone in the wake of realization. “Ah,” he says. “I get it.”

Impossibly, his gentle tone cuts. It’s been a long time since anything other than Sakusa’s ambivalence managed to do that, but Tsukasa’s guilt is making him soft.

“It’s not—” he tries. But it _is_ , and they both know it.

Kai sits up and crosses his legs. He rubs his shoulder for a while then says, gaze downcast, “Has it really been ten years?” 

Tsukasa hesitates, half in his shirt. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Around.”

He slips his arm into the other sleeve. After a while, once he realizes he won’t be getting more of an answer, he says, “More or less.” Then, because he thinks it should be said, he adds, “I’m really sorry.”

“I’m not,” Kai says, climbing to his feet. He pads across the floor to the kitchenette to pour himself a glass of water. Eventually he asks, “Do you think you’ll ever be over him?”

_Him_. It’s hard to tell if it’s an educated guess or something more. Tsukasa’s a nice guy with a wide and varied social circle, but only a handful of people have been in his life for ten whole years. It’s easier to figure out than he likes to admit. 

“Ask me again in a few years,” he sighs. He considers asking Kai about the little pile of petals he found weeks and weeks ago, but that’s also easy to figure out and it’s not something he wants to look directly at just yet. 

“I hope,” Kai says, then stops. He downs the rest of his water and puts his glass in the sink, and when he turns back to look at Tsukasa, his eyes are red.

“Kai,” Tsukasa says, voice quiet. In another life, in a luckier life, maybe this could work. 

“I just hope,” Kai says, “that someday you’ll get to fall in love without destroying yourself in the process.”

A slap would have hurt less. 

“I don’t know what you mean,” Tsukasa lies. 

The look Kai levels him with is pitying. “Don’t do that,” he says. “Denying it, playing coy—you’re just dragging it out. If you’re going to love the guy, just love him already. In the open.”

“It’s not that simple.”

Kai smacks the counter top. “It _is_ that simple,” he insists. “Just because you’re scared doesn’t make it complicated.”

“Of course it does!” Tsukasa snaps, tears on his face, hands shaking. “How would you know? Here’s an idea—you go love someone for ten years, then tell me how I’m supposed to do it.”

Silence prevails. None of the words either of them have left to say would be worth the breath, so Tsukasa quietly finishes dressing in both his clothes and his shame, collects his wallet, and sees himself to the door.

Later, alone in his apartment, he tries to imagine a love without the ache of bursting at his seams, a love that hasn’t rooted itself in his marrow. In another life, maybe everything would be different. In this one, he lays awake and wonders what the fuck he’s doing.

*

By the time Sakusa was in his third year of high school, the world was holding its breath to find out what professional team he’d sign with. Tsukasa—busy with school and a part time job and volleyball all at once—barely had time to keep up with the rumors. Adlers, Rockets, Falcons, Jackals. Every day, a new team wanted Sakusa more than the last. Every day, Sakusa seemed to retreat further into himself, into school, into the game.

Most of what Tsukasa knew about him those days came secondhand, passed along by Komori who called once or twice a month to check in and hint not-so-subtly that Tsukasa should invite them around to visit his off-campus apartment. Tsukasa—who’d never needed to try at playing dumb—let the hints pass without acknowledgment. 

It wasn’t malicious avoidance. But, the way he saw it, every kilometer he put between himself and Sakusa was for the best. His love was a stubborn-rooted thing; it woke him up some nights with tepals between his teeth and berries, bursting and bitter, on his tongue. A few nights a month he ended up dizzy and groaning into a toilet bowl, his cheek plastered against the porcelain seat while his stomach churned and his heartbeat skip, skip, skipped.

At his check-ins, the nurses had no answers for him. They said, _We’re not sure why your body hasn’t built up an immunity to your flower’s poison. Our understanding of Hanahaki as a whole is—tenuous, at best._

Once, he asked his father, “What would you have done if Mom never loved you back?”

The question seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Across the table from him, his aunties turned pale under their makeup. At his side, his father continued to sip his miso. The humming of the aircon drowned out the distant notes of cicada song. 

“I probably would have kept loving her anyway,” his dad said at last. “That’s all anybody can do, I think.”

“Shameless boy,” one of his aunties sighed, a smile—sad and sweet—on her lips. “You got those manners from your mother, you know.”

So, Tsukasa kept his distance. He didn’t attend most of Itachiyama’s games, though going to university in Tokyo meant he was close enough to make the trip without much effort. The most he allowed himself was the phone calls with Komori, where he’d ask, _How’s Sakusa doing these days?_ and hope that he sounded unaffected by how the name felt on his tongue.

The phone call came on the cusp of autumn, just as the library was closing and Tsukasa was gathering his things under the eye of a hawkish librarian. 

“Sakusa,” he said, voice bright with surprise. It left him in a puff of warm air, visible against the crisp dark night. “This is a surprise. I didn’t know you had my number.”

On the other end of the line, Sakusa was quiet until he said, “I asked Komori for it. Is that a problem?”

Tsukasa could have laughed, but didn’t. “Not a problem at all. What’s up?” 

He picked up his pace as other students began to pour down the steps around him, kicked out just as he had been. The odds were strong that this conversation would end in rhizomes or pips or tepals or a combination of all three, and he wasn’t in the mood to tear his heart open in front of a pack of strangers.

Sakusa asked, “Do you regret it?” A beat. Then clarification: “Going to university.” 

“I didn’t have other options,” Tsukasa reminded him. “By the end of my third year, only Division 3 wanted me, remember?”

“Do you regret it?” Sakusa asked again.

Tsukasa shifted his phone from one shoulder to the other and adjusted his bag. “I don’t know. I try not to think about that sort of thing. I just picked the best option I had.”

“So you don’t regret it.”

“I regret a lot of things, Sakusa,” Tsukasa admitted. “Most of the time I’m just doing my best to outrun that feeling. The second it catches up to me, I’ve lost.”

Across the line, silence prevailed. 

“I won’t lose,” Tsukasa said, voice firm. “There will be time to think about everything else later. Right now, I’m focusing on what’s in front of me.”

“Okay,” Sakusa said at last. “I get it. Goodnight, Iizuna-san.”

He ended the call. In total, it had lasted less than five minutes. Tsukasa stood on the steps of his dorm building for a long time afterwards, waiting for the coughing to come. By the time he went inside, a chill had sunk into the marrow of his bones. He slept through the night.

The announcement came the next day: Kiyoomi Sakusa, the best spiker in the nation on the high school level, had rejected all offers of going pro in favor of enrolling in university.

Tsukasa’s university.

*

The first time he hears that the Jackals are coming to Kariya for a match, Tsukasa offers Sakusa his couch and coughs up a dozen tepals into the bend of his elbow after he accepts. 

Sakusa forgoes the team’s bus to drive into town in a rental car, and he shows up on Tsukasa’s doorstep at half-past ten with his volleyball duffel and a bag bursting with cleaning supplies.

“You think this little of me?” Tsukasa asks, grinning even as his pride’s wounded. “Sakusa, I’m hurt.”

He steps aside to let Sakusa in, and he watches with some triumph as Sakusa squints into the space, assessing all of the surfaces in sight. 

“You think your senpai doesn’t know how to keep his place sparkling?” Tsukasa teases, moving past him on his way towards the kitchen. 

Sakusa scowls as if to say, _I shared a dorm with you at two different training camps_ , but sets his bag of cleaning supplies on the closest counter before moving further into the apartment to continue his assessment of the space.

The place was arranged by the League, at a complex known for its cleanliness and security. It’s small but comfortable, though it seems more cramped with Sakusa slouching his way from room to room, eyes narrowed and fists shoved deep in his jacket pockets.

In the end, he sits gingerly on the couch and concedes, “I expected much worse.”

“I live to please,” says Tsukasa, offering him the truth with the flippancy of an easy, rote joke. 

Seeing Sakusa amongst all his things reminds Tsukasa of a half-formed fantasy, a dream he once had of being allowed inside, being allowed to be near. Seeing him in the context of this space plants a terrible, wonderful seed of hope: _Maybe this time, everything will change_. 

“There’s empty drawers in the table,” Tsukasa says, kicking the side of his coffee table when he’s close enough. “You can unpack your things. Get comfortable.”

Sakusa considers him, then considers the coffee table. Slowly, like he thinks it might bite, he rolls open one of the drawers and peers inside. 

“Alright,” he says. 

Compared to Tsukasa’s mood, even the sun would be dim. 

He takes a seat on the far side of the couch and watches closely as Sakusa pulls out his things: sneakers and socks and undershirt and jersey and toothbrush and face masks and more—so much more than his duffel should be capable of fitting. And bit by bit, piece by piece, he packs the drawers neatly and deliberately until they’re equally full, only the toiletries and shoes left out.

Watching him stirs up a dozen half-formed fantasies of would-be domesticity, of what a shared life with Kiyoomi Sakusa might entail. 

Then, Tsukasa spots a copy of _Volleyball Monthly_ still in Sakusa’s bag. He snatches it despite the scowl it earns him. On the cover is Atsumu Miya, mid jump with his tongue stuck out. The issue’s headline reads: HAPPY BIRTHDAY ATSUMU! In the top right corner, OCT 2018 is printed. 

“They do birthday issues?” Tsukasa asks, baffled. He dropped his subscription a few years ago, but he’s fairly sure he’s never seen one before.

“If you ask,” Sakusa says without looking up, too focused on rearranging a couple of items in the left drawer to be bothered.

As far as answers go, that one actually tracks. Back in high school, at the youth training camps they attended, Atsumu had earned an odd reputation for being a _Volleyball Monthly_ fanatic. For anyone else, it’d probably be unthinkable to ask a magazine to give you a birthday cover. For Atsumu? Well.

“Birthday or not,” Tsukasa says when Sakusa returns, “we’re still gonna beat you guys.”

Sakusa meets his gaze. His eyes are impossibly, unfathomably dark—made for getting lost in, if you’re prone to cliches. If you’re Tsukasa.

“Good luck,” Sakusa says, eyes crinkling in that telltale way that meant he’s smirking under his face mask. “You’ll need it.”

Tsukasa, shivering with happiness, drops the magazine and pushes to his feet. “I should check my mail, actually,” he says. “If I step out, you’re not going to rob me, right?”

Sakusa rolls his eyes. 

“I’m taking that as a _‘No senpai, I’d never’,_ ” Tsukasa says, and he beams as Sakusa scowls once more, this one saying, _Why do you insist on the senpai thing?_

Then, before he bursts open with feeling, he lets himself out into the hall, closes the door behind him, and takes off for the stairs. He makes it about a hundred feet before he gives into it, shaking as he coughs up flower after flower after flower. 

Soon, he thinks, everything will change. Soon, he’ll be brave.

*

But he learned a long time ago the danger of hoping.

The January of Sakusa’s third year in high school—Tsukasa’s first year in university—was especially biting. Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, however, was uncomfortably warm. Or maybe it was just Tsukasa, who sat on the edge of his seat with his hands digging into his thighs as the final set of the final match drew to an end.

Itachiyama and Inarizaki. How many times had they played one another? How many times had Itachiyama defeated Inarizaki over the years?

How many of those games featured _this_ Atsumu Miya, broader and taller in his captain’s jersey, each serve and set more lethal and more precise than the last? He was almost indistinguishable from the matchstick boy Tsukasa met years ago at the Youth Training Camp. Fanned to raging glory by the overhead lights, cheering fans, and the thrill of victory, this Atsumu Miya was a wildfire. All Tsukasa could do from his seat in the stands was watch him catch and burn and consume the entire stadium. 

In the end: Inarizaki 20, Itachiyama 18. 

In the end: _Best Setter, Atsumu Miya_. 

In the end: Sakusa, sweating and slouching and scowling into the middle distance, collecting his things without a hint of regret on his face. 

How he could stand it was beyond Tsukasa. How anyone could come so close, right at the end of everything, and walk away so nonplussed, was and would always be a mystery to him.

But he went to him all the same.

“You played well!” he said, accepting a clap on the back from Komori, ruffling his hair affectionately in turn. 

Sakusa said, “I know.” His gaze wandered away, as it was wont to, and Tsukasa didn’t try to catch it, knowing it would come back around soon enough. “I didn’t expect to see you Iizuna-san.”

“What? Why wouldn’t I come cheer on my favorite underclassmen?” 

There it was: Sakusa’s dark gaze on Tsukasa again, unfathomable as ever. “You haven’t come to any other matches this year.”

This close, it was easy to see that Sakusa’s cheeks and ears and throat were burned a ruddy red. Surely just exertion. Surely this was the result of five entire sets played.

A cruel passing thought occurred to Tsukasa: _But, maybe—_

It was enough to start the cycle anew. Something in Tsukasa’s chest constricted, making it difficult for him to breathe. Making it difficult for him, period. 

“University isn’t all fun and games, you know,” he forced himself to say, like he wasn’t acutely aware of the stirring within him, the acute joy of his absence being noted was enough to simultaneously fuel a hundred different fantasies of love. “I’ve been busy. Let’s see how you handle it next year.”

“Don’t listen to him, Tsukasa,” Komori said with a wry look, “Knowing Sakusa, he’s going to move to Osaka and we won’t see him for years.”

_Osaka_. Dread, cold and familiar, blossomed like a bruise. 

“Ah,” he forced himself to say, looking at Sakusa who seemed to be looking anywhere else. “Osaka, huh? Change your mind about Tokyo?”

Sakusa’s gaze swung his way again and slid off of him like water. “I was offered a better scholarship,” he said.

“Congratulations,” Tsukasa said with a lie for a smile. “I can’t stay—I’ve got to get to my part time job. I just wanted to see you both before I went.”

Goodbyes were said, but Tsukasa only half-heard them over the rush of unhappiness whistling through him. 

In the cab on the way home, he leaned his temple against the cold window and closed his eyes. The place within him was as dark and deep and unfathomable as Sakusa’s slippery, unfixed gaze. His chest lurched. His stomach churned. Disappointment was a special sort of poison. 

“Excuse me,” he called up to the driver, voice ragged, “can you pull over? I’m going to be sick.”

  
  


*

Years later, the new year dashes all hope that the Hornets might nab a championship this season. In addition to Sakusa, the Jackals pluck Shouyou Hinata out of thin air and add him to their roster, and between the two of them and their libero it’s damn near impossible to land _anything_ on their side of the court. 

Yaku seethes over it through the holidays, disappears for two weeks, and comes back swaddled in brand new ICS pieces, face hidden behind a massive pair of designer sunglasses, and announces that he’s absolutely going to tear them all to shreds next season. Even Tsukasa, who knows a thing or two about bouncing back from bone-deep disappointment, can’t help but admire his resolve.

Come February, when they’re still licking their wounds and preparing for exhibition matches, Tsukasa’s general sense of sportsmanship has him going to EJP and Jackals games when he can, happy to cheer Komori and Sakusa on even if his own team’s dreams have been dashed this season.

If nothing else, it’s hard to watch little Shouyou Hinata fly on the court and not think, _Anything is possible_. 

It’s hard, though, watching the Jackals improving with every play, all of them learning exactly the right way to balance each other out. Harder than that is seeing Atsumu at the center of it all, his form as intimidating and as wonderful to behold now as it had been all those years ago. And hardest of all is hearing Atsumu and Hinata tearing about the court and calling—

“Omi-san!” 

Jealousy rouses in the home it made for itself amongst the flowers in Tsukasa’s chest. It leaves a bitterness in his mouth that he tastes on his tongue with every receive and serve and spike he cheers for. In all the years of knowing him, Tsukasa’s never quite braved ‘ _Kiyoomi’_. Anything more familiar was out of the question. But he’s known Sakusa for ten years; it’s ridiculous to feel displaced and outgrown over the sound of a silly nickname.

And yet.

Once the Jackals take the fourth set and the match, relief rushes through him. _Omi-san_ in Hinata’s cheerful, encouraging tone had been difficult to hear; _Omi-kun_ over and over and over again in Atsumu’s lilting, friendly accent had nearly broken him. Death by a thousand syllables. 

As the crowd empties the stadium, Tsukasa lingers. He draws deep breaths in through his nose, tips his head back, and tries not to spin up any fantasies about what might happen when he goes down to congratulate Sakusa for his win.

He does an admirable job of it, actually. He manages to leave the stands and find the right hallway to turn down without imagining the telltale crinkle of Sakusa’s eyes or the sound of approval in his low voice. It’s not until he turns from one hallway into the next that he starts to think, _What if_ —

“Iizuna-san,” Sakusa says.

And there he is, dreams made real. The locker rooms are nowhere in sight; there’s no bantering of victorious teammates echoing in the hall. It’s just the two of them, an arm’s length apart.

“Sakusa,” Tsukasa says, eyebrows raised. “Just the guy I wanted to see. Where are you going?”

“I was looking for you.”

He understands the words, but it takes several seconds to make sense of them. “What,” Tsukasa says. 

Sakusa scowls. Tsukasa can barely think straight over the revelation of _I was looking for you,_ but he thinks this look may mean, _You heard me_. 

Eventually he asks, “Why?”

Maybe today everything will change.

Sakusa shifts his weight from foot to foot and sinks deeper into his slouch. In his pockets, his fists twist. It seems impossible that Kiyoomi Sakusa might experience _nerves_ , like any other person on the street, but here he is—beautiful and real before Tsukasa’s eyes.

“What do you like?” Sakusa asks. The words sound strained; Tsukasa wonders how they feel in his mouth. Do they taste as sweet as they sound? 

Hope, dangerous though it is, springs eternal.

“What do I like?” he asks, and it’s an effort to keep his voice from shaking. “Uh—”

“For gifts,” Sakusa continues. “I’m thinking about… gifts.” 

In all Tsukasa’s life, there’s really only two things he’s liked to the exception of all else: volleyball and Sakusa. Every other interest he had came and went, as short-lived as the seasons. 

“I like ICS,” he says, dazed. “They have this windbreaker from their most recent collection—I like it a lot.” 

Though he knows, he knows, he knows he shouldn’t, he’s already calculating. February means Valentine’s Day. Shortly after, White Day.

He adds, in a petal soft voice, “Can’t go wrong with chocolate or flowers, either.”

Sakusa squints at him. This time, for the first time, Tsukasa looks away first. 

“Flowers,” Sakusa says. “That’s the last thing I thought you’d suggest.”

It surprises a laugh, bright and a little wet, from within Tsukasa. “ _Wow_ ,” he says. “We haven’t talked about my condition in—what—nine years? And _that’s_ how you do it?”

Sakusa shrugs. After a beat he says, “Sorry,” but it sounds so strange coming from him that Tsukasa boggles.

“Who are you and what have you done with Kiyoomi?” he asks, feeling brave and bold and undone by thoughts of _Maybe, maybe, maybe_. The name is sweet as sin, as poison on his tongue.

“Whatever,” Sakusa huffs, rolling his eyes hard enough that it’s frankly a surprise he doesn’t pull anything. 

“Hey,” Tsukasa says, smiling wide enough it’s frankly a surprise _he_ doesn’t pull anything, “what’s good to eat around here?”

*

It had been a night like any other. Almost.

A boiling midsummer day had sunk into a simmering midsummer night, and the humid air inside the izakaya was thick with the stench of beer and bouts of boisterous laughter. 

That bitter January day was a year and a half ago, a lifetime ago, a contract ago. It might as well have been some other Tsukasa who’d stood on the sidewalk before god and a hundred pedestrians and one very annoyed cab driver to cough up a pile of pink pips. Surely it was another Tsukasa who’d felt the winter’s cold right down to the marrow, who’d stayed in bed shivering for nearly a week after. 

He was due back to Hiroshima first thing in the morning, but the team had dragged him out to celebrate following their narrow win over the Black Jackals. Even if he hadn’t played tonight—the ink on his contract still too fresh—Tsukasa had sat on the bench and felt the thrill of each and every point the Hornets won just the same. Now he sat as still as he could manage, pink-cheeked and proud, and tried not to think too much about the fact that they were in _Osaka_. 

Sakusa had an evening astronomy lab that had kept him from coming to the game (though, he likely would have skipped regardless, too wary of crowded places to enjoy himself in stadiums). Was he finished? Would he—

Another drink was pushed into Tsukasa’s hand. At the same time, his phone began to buzz.

He fished it out of his pocket and squinted at the screen, trying to make sense of what it said. It was a wish made real. 

INCOMING CALL: KIYOOMI SAKUSA

“I have to take this,” he said to no one in particular. 

Getting out of the crowded bar, tipsy and brimming with excitement and the thrill of being contacted _first_ , was difficult. By the time he stood on the sidewalk and answered the call, Tsukasa’s breathing was labored.

“Sakusa?” he asked. “What’s up?”

Rummaging on the other end of the line. The realization that this might be a pocket dial felt like a bucket of cold water being thrown in his face. 

Then: “Hey.”

Fifteen minutes later, Tsukasa all but fell out of the cab onto the path through the park across from Sakusa’s apartment. From there, he only had to walk a few minutes to find the bench where Sakusa had planted himself. He was slouched against the wood, head tipped back, eyes closed, burgundy shirt stretched tight across his chest. Against the darkness, he was the shadow of the moon. 

He wasn’t wearing a mask. He looked tired. Tsukasa stepped as close as he dared and held his breath.

“You came,” Sakusa said, gaze cracking open into a squint. The bags under his eyes were more pronounced than ever. Tsukasa ached to brush his thumbs against them, to soothe them away. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

He took a seat on the bench next to Sakusa, aware of his dark attention following him the whole way. “Of course I did,” he said. “What was I going to do? Leave you alone?”

Sakusa’s expression did something complicated and unfamiliar. “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said. 

And then he touched Tsukasa’s hair.

It was careful—like he was uncertain of his welcome or like he might have been touching something very, very precious. His fingers traced the sweep of Tsukasa’s bangs, but he might as well have reached right into his chest to touch his heart.

Tsukasa couldn’t breathe.

He’d been growing flowers in his lungs for nearly six years now, but never had his chest felt so full, so tight, so painful as it did now as he swelled with feeling once again.

“That’s not fair,” he said, voice barely a whisper. He had to know. How could he not?

Sakusa took his hand away. “Sorry,” he said. When Tsukasa risked a glance at him, he didn’t recognize any part of Sakusa’s expression. And his voice was even stranger when he opened his mouth and said, “I miss you.”

The words were as sweet as berries. Tsukasa wondered if these, too, were poisonous. 

“You’re sleep deprived,” he accused.

“I am,” Sakusa agreed. “Come back with me?”

Later that night and for the rest of his life, Tsukasa would dream of what he might have done next:

He’d help Sakusa to his feet and lead him out of the park and across the street. They’d stumble a few times. Tsukasa would laugh; Sakusa would grumble. In the elevator, they’d stand in silence. Tsukasa would feel small under Sakusa’s arm—still slung over his shoulders—and tucked against his side. At Sakusa’s door, he’d fish the key out of Sakusa’s jacket, and they’d stumble together inside. Sakusa, too tired to stay upright any longer, would fall into bed and drag Tsukasa down beside him. And like that, limbs tangled together, still in their clothes, they’d sleep.

And what a sweet dream it would be.

In reality, Tsukasa climbed to his feet and offered his hands out to Sakusa. By now he knew better than to put much stock in dreams. “I have a bus to catch tomorrow morning, and any second now you’re going to start drooling on yourself,” he said. “C’mon, let’s go.”

And Sakusa, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded. He took Tsukasa’s hands in his own. His palms were cold. 

Tsukasa hauled him to his feet, and together they walked to the edge of the park and across the street. 

“Get some sleep,” Tsukasa said at the entrance to Sakusa’s building. “You need it.”

A muscle in Sakusa’s jaw worked. He said, “Tsu—” and stopped. 

Tsukasa’s heart was a pappus. He wanted to taste that syllable off Sakusa’s lips. For a while, Sakusa was quiet. His expression was familiar now; this was the look he gave each of Tsukasa’s tosses, the one he had when he quietly analyzed a situation and decided on his next move.

Finally, he said, “Goodnight.” 

And Tsukasa, who could still feel the ghost of Sakusa’s touch against his palms, said, “Goodnight, Sakusa.”

*

Even now, that night haunts him.

He aches with the memory of it as Valentine’s Days comes and goes. As White Day comes and goes. As Sakusa doesn’t reach out and no gift comes in the mail. 

Expecting it doesn’t make it hurt less—because of course he expected it, why would Sakusa ask for him to suggest his own gifts?—but Tsukasa spends most of March feeling hungover from his own feelings. Most nights find him slumped in the bathroom, tepals stuck between his teeth and his stomach roiling. 

Maybe, in a luckier life, everything would change.

In this life, though, he feels like some vital piece of him has suddenly been scooped out. Maybe it’s the memory of the one time he held Sakusa’s hands in his own. Maybe it’s the knowledge of Sakusa’s scowls, of the minute differences from one to the next that he’d dedicated a decade of study to. Maybe it’s the hope that he’d clung to all this time—despite telling himself otherwise—that love, real and honest love, might eventually blossom.

He presses his cheek, red and ruddy with tears, to the edge of the pristine toilet bowl, too weak to hold his head up any longer, and stares blearily down at the pink and white flowers floating in the water, at the leaves that have sunken beneath the surface, twisting, serpentine, against the base of the bowl. 

For a long time he’s quiet, his wet breaths the only sound in the whole apartment, maybe in all the world.

The violent vibrating of his phone against the floor tiles startles a shriek out of him and has him flailing, chin knocked against the porcelain, legs akimbo and kicking. 

**[Kiyoomi Sakusa][08:14:21]:** Are you busy the 20th? 

Tsukasa read the words once, twice, ten times over, and even then they don’t quite make sense. In fact, the longer he looks at them, the less sense they seem to make.

**[Me][08:19:42]:** You mean on your birthday?

He knows the date better than he knows his own birthday. Better, maybe, than anyone else in the whole world. 

**[Kiyoomi Sakusa][08:22:06]:** Are you busy?

Tsukasa wipes his face, smearing away the tear tracks, and sniffs wetly. Everything seems very melodramatic, now that he isn’t consumed with self pity. 

**[Me][08:25:13]:** I’ll have to check my calendar

**[Me][08:25:20]:** ʕ ᵔᴥᵔ ʔ

Time could give him the right answer. And it felt important to get this right. Because there probably wouldn’t be another life. There’d just be this one, and if anything is going to change, Tsukasa’s going to have to be the one to make that happen.

**[Kiyoomi Sakusa][08:34:57]:** I know a good place to eat. 

The text reads like an inside joke and feels like an answer. Like a neat, romantic little bookend. Somehow, despite everything, it’s still such a wonder, such a joy, to feel _known_.

Resolve is a slow-growing seed. At long-last, after a decade, Tsukasa feels it sprout. If bravery came as easily to him as setting, as crying, or as falling in love, who knows what it might have changed. But now he knows the simplest truth: no amount of wondering could get him what he wants.

So he has to take it, instead. At the very least, he has to try.

**[Me][08:41:06]:** It’s a birthday miracle! And my treat.

**[Me][08:43:00]:** Let’s meet at the bench.

Later, when he lets himself out onto his balcony, the air is sweet with the promise of spring, with rebirth. If the whole world could start fresh and new, why couldn’t Tsukasa’s relationship with Sakusa? Just because he’s scared doesn’t mean it’s complicated.

And maybe this time he could fall in love without destroying himself in the process.

*

The morning after that first night on the bench, Tsukasa took a window seat on the Hornets’ bus and settled in for the ride back to Kariya. Even before they started to move, the world beyond the window was a blur. Nothing was as sharp or detailed as the memory of Sakusa, chin angled up at the sky, eyes closed, his lashes dark smudges against his wan face. Tsukasa wanted to press the memory of him, disarmed by exhaustion, between the pages of his heart.

In his pocket, his phone buzzed. 

**[Kiyoomi Sakusa][09:12:18]:** Sorry. 

Tsukasa stared at it for a long time, wondering what _exactly_ he was sorry for. In the end, he figured—might as well ask.

**[Me][09:17:32]:** What for?

The reply came minutes later, just long enough for Tsukasa to think of the worst possible ways he could be rejected now.

**[Kiyoomi Sakusa][09:26:03]:** I wasn’t myself.

Then, immediately after:

**[Kiyoomi Sakusa][09:26:18]:** Thanks for your help.

Ah. So they weren’t going to talk about it in any real detail, then. Because Sakusa couldn’t remember it? Or because he remembered but didn’t want to acknowledge what had happened? Each option seemed worse than the other.

The entire situation was a Gordian knot of mixed signals. No matter what string Tsukasa tried to pull, the tangle wouldn’t give. The simplest thing to do—and also the hardest—was to leave it alone.

**[Me][09:29:42]:** Don’t mention it.

**[Me][09:29:51]:** Go back to sleep.

He turned off his phone. 

On the other side of the window, the world was still a blur. When he closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to the glass, he saw Sakusa haloed in the darkness. His chest seized. 

Halfway between Osaka and Kariya, he coughed up a berry into the palm of his hand. Just a single one, ripe and red. He imagined it as all of the nameless, unwanted feelings he had for Sakusa Kiyoomi and crushed it in his fist. 

*

And in another life, maybe that would have been the end of it. In this one—

March 20th is a day like no other. The sky overhead is an impossible shade of blue. There’s not a cloud in sight. The air in Osaka is sweet with the smell of cherry blossoms. And, in the middle of it all: Tsukasa. Hope incarnate. 

He arrives an hour earlier than he’d planned to with a bouquet in one hand, a box of chocolates in the other, and his heart—tender and raw—on his sleeve.

A lifetime ago, he inherited this world from his mother. As he moves through the park, he walks in her gait, looks about with her eyes, smiles her smile. And for today, if only for today, he’s gathered her courage too. 

How many times has he imagined this day, without knowing it would be _this day_? It seems silly, in retrospect. Long ago, there was a version of him that wasn’t helplessly, terribly in love with Kiyoomi Sakusa, and he would have laughed at the coward he grew up to be. What is it about having a chest full of flowers that turns him weak, that makes him scared?

The world today is made of sunshine and hope. It’s a day meant to be remembered. 

“Tsu—” Sakusa says, the syllable barely audible over a sudden whistling wind that shakes a whorl of cherry blossoms from their branches. 

Tsukasa looks for him and finds him on their bench, the same bench he was spread across all those years ago, the only time he was exhausted enough to _need_ Tsukasa. 

To look at him is to love him. Now Tsukasa looks and looks his fill.

Then Sakusa says, “Tsumu,” and Tsukasa notices the figure slouched against Sakusa’s side, bundled in an oversized windbreaker, the collar popped up around his ears. 

“I’m _hungry_ ,” Atsumu complains. “If I’d known you’d just wanna look at the cherry blossoms, I’d’ve ditched yer ass and gotten lunch.” 

“We’re getting lunch in,” Sakusa checks his phone, “an hour.”

Atsumu makes a sound like he’d rather eat his fist than wait that long.

Tsukasa clears his throat and says, “Or we could go now.” 

Sakusa jerks his head to look up at him. He’s not wearing a mask. Atsumu takes one look at Tsukasa’s face, then his gaze drops to the flowers and chocolate he has in hand. His eyes narrow and his lips thin.

“You’re early,” says Sakusa.

The accusation within that feels unfair. “I’m always early,” Tsukasa reminds him.

“Always?” Atsumu asks, his voice sharp and unkind. Ah, well. It was probably too much to hope that he’d somehow become a world-class setter while being completely oblivious. 

“Always,” Tsukasa assures him.

The considering look Sakusa angles his way hurts almost as much as Atsumu’s presence here, on that bench. Worse is the sight of the burgundy shirt he’s wearing, which is stretched out and loose across his chest and along the collar. Worst of all is the ICS logo on Atsumu’s windbreaker, the distinct triangle detail on the shoulders, the knowledge of just who Sakusa was gift shopping for last month. He’s struck again with how silly he was, thinking it could have been for him. 

Just like that, Tsukasa’s courage leaves him.

He offers the bouquet to Sakusa and the chocolates to Atsumu. “Happy birthday,” he says. “Enjoy. Try not to spoil your lunch.”

Atsumu accepts the box, but he looks decidedly unhappy about it. Sakusa studies the assortment of flowers for a while, jaw working like he’s chewing on a thought. His gaze, when it slides up to study Tsukasa’s face, gives little away.

“What?” Tsukasa asks, defensive. “It’s _funny_. Don’t make it weird.”

Atsumu tears into the plastic wrapping around the chocolates. “Hilarious,” he says, tone flat. “I’d say get him on the cover of _Volleyball Monthly_ but I already did that to get back at him for _my_ birthday.”

They smirk without looking at each other, each of them smug in their own right. There’s no space between them where Tsukasa could imagine himself fitting, so he takes a step back instead. All the better to process this situation. Every centimeter of distance between him and Sakusa is for the better.

_If you ask_ , Sakusa had said back in October, in Tsukasa’s little apartment in Kariya. And Tsukasa had assumed he’d meant _Atsumu_ had asked. How stupid.

“I didn’t expect to see you today, Atsumu,” he manages to say. “Is Komori coming, too?”

Atsumu’s grin is worth a hundred thousand words, all of them mocking and smug, as he asks Sakusa, “You wanna explain it or should I?”

“I’m good,” Tsukasa says quickly, holding his hands up in surrender—because what other choice does he have? “No explanation necessary.”

This seems to satisfy Atsumu, who turns his attention to the box of chocolates and immediately pops two into his mouth. Each shape is stuffed with a different filling, and none of the fillings are listed anywhere on the box. Any normal person might balk at the risk, but Atsumu, unlike Tsukasa, is made of little more than bravery. 

“These’re good, Omi,” he crows, chocolate on his lips, eyes ever-bright. “Want some?”

Sakusa shakes his head and leans away at the shoulders but leaves his arm where it’s pressed to Atsumu’s from elbow to wrist. 

“You’re a mess,” Sakusa sighs, eyes on Atsumu’s face. 

He watches, grimacing as Atsumu chews with his mouth open and sucks his sticky fingers into his mouth one at a time. Tsukasa watches Sakusa watch him. Tsukasa watches and watches, and Sakusa never once looks away. 

Atsumu bares his teeth in turn; it might be a smile or a taunt, Tsukasa has no way of telling.

But Sakusa must know, because he reaches out and touches the tips of his fingers to the sweep of Atsumu’s bangs, careful like he’s unsure of his welcome or like he’s touching something impossibly precious. And Atsumu—who sometimes seems more god than man, who’s scared the shit out of Tsukasa since the first time he heard his name—melts. 

Tsukasa looks away. His eyes sting, and he begs his body _not now, not now, not now_ , like he’s ever had a say in the matter in the last ten years. 

Years ago, when Sakusa had called him to this park, when he’d confessed _I miss you_ , when he’d touched _Tsukasa_ like that—who had that all been meant for? How long had this been going on, and how many hints had he willfully ignored because they didn’t make sense in the grand scheme of his own romantic fantasy?

How silly. How stupid. How stubborn. 

By the time the roar of Tsukasa’s heartbeat in his ears has quieted to a whisper, Atsumu’s saying, “—well, ya better _get_ used t’it if we’re gonna live together next year.” 

“That’s a long way away,” says Sakusa, in a tone Tsukasa’s never heard before, warmer than the sun, lighter than air. To anyone else, someone who hadn’t been an avid student of Sakusa’s many subtleties, it’d maybe sound vaguely amused. 

“You’re waiting a year?” he asks, easy as anything, like the question doesn’t twist the knife. 

“Omi-kun’s got student loans to pay off,” Atsumu says with a sigh. “If he’d stayed in Tokyo with the scholarships like I _told him to_ —”

Sakusa’s gaze cuts sharply to Tsukasa. Tsukasa feels it on him, dark and fathomless, and resists the pull of it. To look at him right now would be to hate him, and he doesn’t know that he wants that version of himself to exist.

“So, you’re staying long enough to pay those off, then getting an apartment together?” he asks. “Very responsible.”

Atsumu makes a face like he knows he’s being condescended to and doesn’t have a cuss strong enough to express his contempt for it. Sakusa looks at him, leaving Tsukasa with only the ghost of his attention.

“Are we doing lunch or what?” Atsumu demands, plucking a cherry blossom out of Sakusa’s hair, then another off his jacket. 

When he takes his hands away, Sakusa leans back into his space, a flower following the sun, and Atsumu curls a palm around the back of his neck and leaves it there, allowed.

“Lunch,” Tsukasa says weakly, too in the weeds to fight his way out. “My treat.” 

Atsumu gets to his feet, hesitates, then offers Sakusa both of his hands. Sakusa’s smile as he slides their palms together is softer and sweeter than Tsukasa’s ever dreamt. He looks away before he can be caught staring. 

The day is made of sunshine, of cherry blossoms, of beginnings, and of endings. It’s a day meant to be remembered. 

Today, at long last, everything has changed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote! Thanks you so much for reading. Thank you Grace for the quick beta. Thank you to everyone who's provided me with moral support along the way. I wouldn't have gotten here without y'all! If you'd like to scream about SakuAtsu or what I've done to Tsukasa in this piece, come hang out with me on Twitter where I'm [@bratsumu](https://twitter.com/bratsumu)!

**Author's Note:**

> I dedicate this work to Quip—whose birthday is today and who once set me on a tangent talking about this story idea—and to Ginny—who was the first one who inspired the idea in me—and to Elle who requested a Hanahaki story back in SakuAtsu week (sorry for the wait!)—and to Moe—who was the person who made me think about Hanahaki in an entirely new light. I hope everyone loves this story like I do, but I especially hope the four of you are fans of it.
> 
> I'd like to issue my sincerest apologies to Motoya Komori, who deserved exactly none of what I did to him in this story. I can only promise you that he finds love later with Washio, and together they lay their gardens to rest and find a sort of perpetual spring together. I'm certain it's very sweet and full to brimming with love. It's just not the story I wanted to write today.
> 
> A huge, huge, huge thanks to Grace for coming in clutch with a last-minute beta for me. Again. You're my hero.
> 
> If you're a SakuAtsu fan or would like to yell at me about anything you've read today, you can join me on Twitter where I'm [@bratsumu](https://twitter.com/bratsumu). This is my first formal try at anything even vaguely resembling a bad end, so if the story hits right for you, please please please consider leaving a comment on this story. They're so good for my soul.
> 
> Thanks for taking the time to read this monster!


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